Violence was a daily fact of life in the world of John James Audubon (1785–1851). Animal slaughter, disease, the rigors of backwoods life, and travel all made up close and personal varying levels of violence from which modernity insulates us.

Even though Audubon set out with a gun to shoot birds in order to be able to pose them for their portraits, a large part of his life was consumed by tender dreams of birds, which appeared to him in his sleep and fired his imagination with an obsessive force.

Many noble heads of birds grace the walls at the New-York Historical Society, which, through March 16, offers the latest in its extraordinary sequence of exhibitions, which draw from the society’s collection of the original watercolors painted for the double-elephant folio print edition of Audubon’s “Birds of America” (1827–38).

Watercolors’ fragility makes it impossible for a museum to exhibit them in all but rare instances. Lovers of watercolor are a bit like birders, ever stalking the elusive object of admiration. Any major museum exhibition of watercolors should be treated as a major event. This isn’t some blockbuster that’s rolled in from out of town. These watercolors are here all of the time, just in hiding. That makes the experience of seeing them all the more delightful.

It would be quite enough if curator Roberta J. M. Olson simply pulled random images from storage. But she has enhanced the exhibition by building it around the theme of the endangerment and extinction of bird species. In this she has been assisted by the New York City Audubon Society, the local affiliate of the national organization, founded in 1905, that educates the public about birds and lobbies for their protection. Among the hundreds of species portrayed by Audubon, a number have since faced endangerment and extinction.

The environmental movement, such as we know it, did not exist in Audubon’s time. The term “ecology” was first used in 1866. There was, however, the Romantic movement, which originated in continental Europe, spread to England, and then found a special niche in America, where pioneers daily battled with violent nature that yet yielded something of the divine at every turn.

The impulse to aestheticize nature was in part an attempt to put it in its place. Instead of ecologists, we had “naturalists.” And among them, the line between art and science was blurred. A straight line connects the writings of the great 18th-century Philadelphia naturalist John Bartram to the landscape paintings of Frederic Church, the disciple of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. And that line runs straight through Audubon. Bartram, Audubon, and Church all made long and arduous treks through savage realms to sate their obsessions — to make from their dreams a highly personalized order out of nature. And in one way of looking at the tradition they made, it hardly matters where art begins and science ends, or where writing ends and painting begins. Audubon exemplified the self-made man of the 19th century. That he should have had the passion to stalk so many birds, and to record them in the minutest detail with such magnificent technique as a watercolorist, was a distinct quality of American progress. Audubon had all the drive, energy, and talent of Edison.

The show begins with some human portraits Audubon made, including one of Henri de Gallon from 1819. It is hard to say whether he looks more bird-like than the California condor or if the California Condor looks more human-like than Henri de Gallon. Audubon posed some of the birds, like the whooping crane, in contorted positions to be able to render them life-size within his frame. Yet such posings bring out much artistry, as when Degas painted similarly contorted ballerinas. Nobody would ever mistake the flat-footed great blue heron, which has just scooped a tasty fish into his beak, for a ballerina — or the wizened-old-man California condor. Audubon prized birds’ coloration, a quality that knows no equal in nature. Watercolor is perhaps the only medium that can truly capture birds’ brilliantly colored diaphanous plumage, which, as light passes through it, blazes in a subtle spectrum, as we see in the yellow feathers of Audubon’s American Goldfinch, and in the electric blue Eastern bluebird.

My favorite is the yellow rail where, in the left margin, Audubon sketched a feather that may profitably be studied up close for its brilliance of detail. Overall, the sheer iridescence and the range of personalities on display are transfixing, as is the outstanding use of recorded bird song — something that was not possible in Audubon’s time.

The show has a strong message to impart about endangered species, and it is well to read the texts carefully for the important information they convey. But in the end, any Audubon exhibition is less about the birds than it is about Audubon and the American self he made out of his glorious obsession.