Classic bird paintings
Tufted Titmouse painting: Audubon's plate and other classic portraits
John James Audubon painted the Tufted Titmouse as plate 39 of The Birds of America (1827–38), under the name Crested Titmouse: a male and a female on a branch of white pine. That plate is the painting shown here, and a free high-resolution scan is on Audubon.org.
Updated
Audubon’s plate: plate 39, “Crested Titmouse”
The pine, Audubon wrote, is the White Pine, Pinus strobus, a tree that had been measured at 180 feet tall. He watched titmice carry beech nuts, acorns and chinquapins to a big branch, wedge them in a crack, hold them with both feet and break the shells with blows of the bill: a tapping you could hear twenty or thirty yards away on a calm day.
They liked to drink by leaning down from a twig over a stream, or by sipping raindrops and dew from the tips of leaves. Their many calls, a whistle or a loud murmur, could seem to come from a bird much farther off, and often disappointed a listener who went looking for something else. In all his travels he had met only two kinds of titmice, and he felt sure more would be found.
Story: Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, vol. 1 (1831). See plate 39 free at Audubon.org.
More classic portraits, free to see
- John James Audubon, The Birds of America, octavo edition (1840–44), plate 125: “Crested Titmouse”. Free scan (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
- John Gould’s The Birds of Europe (1832–37), plate 152: “Toupet Tit” (Parus bicolor). Free scan (University of Kansas Libraries)
- Louis Agassiz Fuertes, for Elon H. Eaton’s Birds of New York (1910–14), plate 103: “Tufted Titmouse”, with 4 other birds. Free scan (Internet Archive)
About the Tufted Titmouse
- A Tufted Titmouse holds a seed or an acorn with its feet and hammers it open with its bill. (Source: National Audubon Society)
The oldest known wild Tufted Titmouse lived at least 12 years and 5 months: it was banded in Virginia in 1962 and found there again in 1974. That is a record from bird banding, not a typical lifespan. (Source: USGS Bird Banding Laboratory, 2025 longevity table.) How long do wild birds live?
Buying a print?
An original plate 39 is a hand-colored sheet about 26 by 38 inches, printed in Britain in 1827–38; many prints sold today are reproductions or small 1840s octavo prints. How to tell an original from a reproduction.
In a Birdfolio, the hardcover book of your own life list, this painting sits beside the Tufted Titmouse with the date and place you first saw one. See your own list as a book, free.