On the cardinal's crimson, and what two centuries did to it.

Wilson's plates were never as bright as the birds. The pigment was always a compromise — with the copper, with the paper, with the weather in a Philadelphia print shop.

Last winter I spent two weeks in the Library Company of Philadelphia turning the leaves of a first impression. The volume had spent most of its life in a closed cabinet on Locust Street, and the page I was looking for — Wilson's Plate XXXVI, with its pair of male and female cardinals on a single twig — was not, as the prospectus had promised, a brilliant red. It was the color of a bruised apple.

A pigment that was never quite at peace with paper.

Wilson and his engraver, Alexander Lawson, were working with vermilion thinned in gum arabic, brushed over a copperplate impression already printed on hand-laid Whatman. The pigment sat on the paper rather than in it. Two hundred summers of foxing, and the ground crept upward into the wash. What we read today as a softened cardinal is, in a sense, a portrait of the paper as much as of the bird.

“The crimson on Plate XXXVI is an honest accident — half pigment, half patience.” — from the introduction, 1814 edition