Robert Havell Jr

Robert Havell Jr was born on November 25, 1793, in Reading, Berkshire, England, into a family of engravers. No school or university record for him has survived in standard reference sources; what is documented is that he trained in aquatint engraving within the workshop of his father, Robert Havell Sr, joining the family firm, Havell & Son, by 1818, in the traditional apprenticeship manner of the trade rather than through formal schooling.

Havell became the principal engraver of John James Audubon's The Birds of America after the project's original engraver, William Lizars, withdrew. Working from Audubon's watercolors, Havell etched, aquatinted, and oversaw the hand coloring of all but the first ten of the work's 435 plates, a role that made him inseparable from the finished work's visual identity. He later emigrated to the United States and, by 1857, had settled in Tarrytown, New York, where he remained for the rest of his life. In his American years he turned increasingly to painting, producing oil and watercolor views of the Hudson River that place him among the Hudson River School. He died on November 11, 1878, in Tarrytown, New York, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

Havell is consistently framed in reference sources as inseparable from Audubon's achievement. Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Smithsonian American Art Museum both credit him as the engraver who executed nearly the entire plate run of The Birds of America, and multiple sources describe his later paintings as squarely within the Hudson River School idiom. His work has been the subject of dedicated museum attention, including the Chazen Museum of Art's 2021 to 2022 exhibition Seeing Audubon: Robert Havell, Jr. and The Birds of America, which focused on his printmaking technique and his collaborative role in the Audubon project, and he appeared in later surveys of Hudson River School painting, including Artists of the Hudson River School at the R.W. Norton Art Gallery in 1973 and Follow the Sun at the Hammond Gallery in 1980. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in current research, so none is reproduced here.

Havell's market divides into two distinct bodies of work, and collectors should read auction results carefully to know which one a price refers to. Individual Havell-engraved plates from Audubon's The Birds of America are typically catalogued and sold as Audubon lots with Havell credited as engraver, which makes it difficult to establish a single, comprehensive price record for his engraving work from the sources reviewed. As a painter, Havell's independent market is far smaller and thinner. The highest documented price identified for a painting attributed to him alone is USD 15,535, paid for View of the Hudson River at Heritage Auctions in Dallas on June 10, 2009. No auction result exceeding this figure has been identified in current research through 2026.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Havell's paintings or for his print work, and no gallery or estate currently represents him; his work reaches the market exclusively through auction houses and print or Americana dealers. Havell-engraved Audubon plates are generally authenticated through the specialist bibliographic literature on The Birds of America, which tracks plate state, paper, and watermarks, while his independent paintings depend more heavily on provenance and dealer or auction house research. Because top results for engraved plates are usually recorded as Audubon lots rather than as Havell lots, collectors comparing prices across sources should confirm whether a given figure reflects the print market or the much smaller market for his signed landscape paintings.