John James Audubon

American naturalist and painter

• Born: April 26, 1785
• Birthplace: Les Cayes, San Domingo (now Haiti)
• Died: January 27, 1851
• Place of death: New York, New York

A gifted artist with a love of nature and a passion for discovery, Audubon became the greatest painter of birds of his time, an important natural scientist, and an inspiration to conservationists.

Early Life

John James Audubon (AH-dew-bahn) was born in Haiti on April 26, 1785, the illegitimate son of Jean Audubon, a French naval officer, and Jeanne Rabin, a French servant girl from Brittany. After his mother’s death, Audubon’s father took him and a younger half sister to France, where he legally adopted his children in 1794. In school, Audubon early revealed his talents for drawing and music. He learned to play the violin and flute and by age fifteen had begun drawing birds and collecting birds’ eggs. After he proved unfit for a naval career, the elder Audubon sent him to Mill Grove, his farm near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. In 1808, following a four-year engagement, Audubon married Lucy Bakewell, a girl of English descent who lived on a neighboring estate. Of their four children, two sons—Victor Gifford and John Woodhouse—survived to adulthood and provided significant help to their father in his painting and publishing projects.

In the United States, Audubon formed a partnership with Ferdinand Rozier, an older Frenchman whom his father had sent to look after him. They became frontier merchants, with stores in Kentucky, first in Louisville, then in Henderson, and finally in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. However, Audubon preferred to trek the forests, observing and painting birds and other wildlife. Finding business irksome, he dissolved the partnership and entered into an ill-fated trade arrangement with his brother-in-law, Thomas Bakewell. In 1813, Audubon and a group of associates built a combination sawmill and gristmill in Henderson, Kentucky. It proved far too ambitious a project to be sustained by the local economy, and its failure left him bankrupt. After being imprisoned for debt, he worked as a taxidermist for the Western Museum in Cincinnati, receiving additional income from portrait painting. In 1820, he set out for New Orleans to continue work as an artist, but, more important, to add to his portfolio of bird paintings. His wife worked as a tutor to support the family, and the two endured many months apart before she joined him in Louisiana.

Life’s Work

For Audubon, an avocation developed into a vocation, though it is not known precisely when the change occurred. In 1810, while he and Rozier were in their Louisville store, Alexander Wilson, the pioneer American ornithologist, showed them his bird paintings and sought a subscription to support publication of his nine-volume American Ornithology (1808-1814). After seeing Wilson’s work, Rozier remarked that his partner’s paintings were better. By allowing Audubon to realize that his amateur work surpassed the work of a professional, this incident probably served as a catalyst to his fertile imagination.

Audubon gradually developed the idea for The Birds of America (1827-1838), an ambitious portfolio of all American species, life-size, in their natural habitats. In its scope, scale, and fidelity to nature, Audubon’s work would eclipse that of his predecessors. In order to include all the known species, he would rely upon the discoveries and observations of others for some of his paintings, not limiting the work to his own observations as Wilson had done. By the time he left for New Orleans in late 1820, the outlines of the work, which would require almost two decades to complete, were formed.

An experienced hunter and skilled woodsman, Audubon combined an intense interest in nature with a sharp eye and essential survival skills. He was equally comfortable alone or in company, and equally ingratiating to Native Americans or European noblemen. At five feet, ten and a half inches tall, he was a man of almost regal appearance, with smooth facial lines, long brown hair, and blue eyes. A contemporary, Mrs. Nathaniel Wells Pope, described him as “one of the handsomest men I ever saw… tall and slender.… His bearing was courteous and refined, simple and unassuming.”

In Audubon’s time, a naturalist needed to collect specimens (usually by shooting), to record his observations in a journal, and to sketch or paint all that he found interesting. To collect specimens, he shot thousands of birds on his expeditions. The collecting, however, did not stop there: He obtained insects, reptiles, and mammals for many other scientists throughout the world. In his lengthy journals, often romantic and even grandiloquent in tone, he made detailed notes about bird sightings and behavior. An almost compulsive painter, he sometimes began sketching a bird by placing its body on a sheet of paper and drawing an outline. Although Audubon occasionally painted live birds, his normal mode was to paint dead ones, which he wired into positions that suited him.

After his efforts to interest New York and Philadelphia publishers in his work failed, Audubon embarked in 1826 for England, where he attempted to attract wealthy patrons for his project by exhibiting his paintings. There, where he was regarded as a natural untaught genius, he became something of a celebrity, being named a fellow of the Royal Society. For The Birds of America he sought two hundred subscribers willing to pay one thousand dollars each; he eventually obtained 161, about half of them from the United States. Subscribers paid for a set of five prints at a time, with eighty sets, or four hundred prints, projected.

The publication, requiring eleven years, began in 1827, in Edinburgh, under the engraver William Lizars. Audubon quickly changed to Robert Havell and Company in London, after Havell impressed the painter with his ability to reproduce color tones. The images were etched on copper plates using aquatint, producing shades of gray and black on a light background. They were engraved on sheets measuring thirty-nine and a half by twenty-six and a half inches, forming the Double Elephant Folio, one of the largest books ever printed. After the engraving, artists colored the prints professionally by hand to match Audubon’s original paintings.

When completed, the work included life-size color prints of 489 species on 435 pages. The total number of bird paintings was 1,065, for Audubon attempted to illustrate different color phases of each species, and for birds of varied coloration he often produced several poses to reveal the colors more effectively. One of his own favorite paintings, that of the wood duck, includes four birds so positioned as to reveal the rich coloration of the species. His painting of the little blue heron shows a full-size adult in the foreground and, at a distance, standing in a marsh, the white immature representative of the species.

During the production of his major work, Audubon returned to the United States three times to collect more specimens and to complete his paintings, leaving publication in the hands of his son Victor and Havell. In the United States, he mounted extended expeditions into the interior of the country, along the Gulf of Mexico, and to Labrador. Meanwhile, with the assistance of the gifted Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray, he prepared and issued five volumes of commentaries as companion volumes to the paintings, Ornithological Biography (1831-1839). The work names and describes each species, provides an account of its behavior and habitats, and often includes vivid narration of Audubon’s experience with the species, the primary source being his unpublished journals.

After completing The Birds of America, Audubon issued the work in a smaller and less expensive edition. He then turned to a new project, this time concerning North American mammals, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1846-1854; plates, 1842-1845), in collaboration with his friend John Bachman. Seeking specimens to paint, he organized his last great expedition in 1843, traveling up the Missouri River to the mouth of the Yellowstone in North Dakota. After age sixty, he suffered a rapid decline in health, marked by a loss of mental powers. He died quietly at his New York City home, Minnie’s Land, on January 27, 1851, leaving completion of his work on the mammals to his sons and to Bachman.

Significance

In ornithology, art, and conservation, Audubon’s fame and influence have endured. During his time, taxonomy was in its early stages, and science developed largely through observation and compilation. Vast areas of the world lay unexplored and unstudied. To discover new species of flora or fauna was an obvious route to achievement, possibly even to fame. Never a theorist and little inclined toward experimentation, Audubon possessed intense curiosity about nature, keen eyes, and a questing, somewhat romantic nature. He discovered a dozen subspecies, more than twenty species, and one genus of American birds. The list, though impressive, is shorter than he believed, because he mistook several variant color phases for new species and unwittingly claimed some prior discoveries of others.

The artistic quality of The Birds of America surpassed that of its predecessors, and the work has not been equaled since in its scale, scope, and aesthetic appeal. Although he occasionally painted with oils, Audubon achieved his best effects using watercolors with an overlay of pastels to enhance color and sharpen detail. Critics, however, have called attention to his limitations as an artist. He sometimes posed his subjects in unnatural positions and uncharacteristic settings, gave some birds human expressions, and could not sustain a uniformly high aesthetic level throughout the long project. However, he succeeded in arousing widespread interest in ornithology and made the birds of the New World familiar to the Old.

In the twentieth century, his name has become synonymous with conservation of wildlife, a legacy not without irony considering the number of birds he felled with his gun. Still, toward the end of his life, he spoke out against egg collecting as a threat to bird populations. During his final Western expedition, he was troubled by the indiscriminate slaughter of bison. He genuinely loved the primitive frontier and feared that it might disappear under the pressure of civilization. In 1886, his protégé and admirer, George Bird Grinnell, organized the first Audubon Society to preserve some of the natural beauty and living creatures of the land Audubon loved.

Bibliography

Audubon, John James. Audubon’s Birds of America: The Audubon Society Baby Elephant Portfolio. New York: Abbeville, 2003. An affordable volume of Audubon’s lifework, endorsed by the Audubon Society and edited by Roger Tory Peterson, a renowned ornithologist. Contains reproductions of 435 hand-colored engravings from the Double Elephant portfolio.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The 1826 Journal of John James Audubon. Edited by Alice Ford. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Careful editing and extensive commentary supplement this important surviving Audubon journal. It reveals Audubon as a careful observer of birds from shipboard during his journey to England.

Chancellor, John. Audubon: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1978. A readable brief biography of Audubon, with a judicious assessment of his achievement. Rich in illustrations.

Ford, Alice. John James Audubon. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. Now the standard biography, it gives a carefully researched account of Audubon’s origins and early life, adding extensive details about his early life in France.

Hart-Davis, Duff. Audubon’s Elephant: America’s Greatest Naturalist and the Making of “The Birds of America.” New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Describes Audubon’s unlikely success in Europe, where he lived for twelve years and obtained the money needed to publish his greatest work.

Harwood, Michael. “Mr. Audubon’s Last Hurrah.” Audubon 87 (November, 1985): 80-117. A lengthy account of Audubon’s journey to North Dakota in 1843, the article provides numerous excerpts from his journals and those of contemporaries.

Harwood, Michael, and Mary Durant. “In Search of the Real Mr. Audubon.” Audubon 87 (May, 1985): 58-119. This article traces Audubon’s career in detail, assesses the many myths that surround him, and provides a critique of his biographers. Generously and judiciously illustrated, with numerous reproductions.

Herrick, Francis Hobart. Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1917, 1938. Although somewhat dated in its research, the biography remains a valuable resource for its comprehensive treatment and its inclusion of many original letters, papers, official records, and documents.

Lindsey, Alton A., ed. The Bicentennial of John James Audubon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. A collection of essays by various writers, the book assesses Audubon’s character, his contributions to science and art, and his influence on conservation.

Rhodes, Richard. John James Audubon: The Making of an American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Extensively researched and comprehensive biography. Aimed at general readers, the book vividly recounts episodes in Audubon’s life, including his relationship with his wife, his move to Kentucky, and his explorations to discover and draw birds.