AUDUBON HOUSE & TROPICAL GARDENS
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Home surrounded by the tropical garden of John James Audubon, ornithologist and painter. His main work is Birds of America.
John James Audubon (Jean-Jacques Audubon in France), born in 1785 of an illegitimate love between a French colonist in Haiti and a young French immigrant to that island, was a famous ornithologist and talented painter. After the early death of his mother and his first years spent on his father's plantation and then in the Audubon family home in Couëron, near Nantes, he left France in 1803 with a false passport to escape Napoleon's conscription. He discovered Key West in the 1830s after several years spent in the United States and was immediately amazed by this new and luxuriant nature that he undertook to restore by painting it. He painted a total of 22 birds of the Florida Keys between 1831 and 1832. His work is considerable. Birds of America, his main work, includes more than 430 plates, and an original edition became in 2010 the most expensive book in the world at an auction. You will be able to see some of it in the museum. In addition, you will be charmed by the tropical garden that surrounds the house. Finally, you can visit the lovely home itself, three floors of European furnishings, including Chippendale furniture and original Audubon prints. The building, originally the captain's residence of the first harbor built in Key West but virtually destroyed in 1958, has been restored by the Wolfson Foundation. For those who are interested, the house has been declared haunted...
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Doubtless the most beautiful museum Keys.
Works of Audubon are superb.
An oasis of tranquillity in a rather crazy island, not a little.