Persistent Showman Brought Birds to Life on the Page : Notes on John James Audubon
Audubon was not the man you likely thought he was, nor was he always what he claimed to be. But that matters little in appreciating an American life story, marked by passion and bouts of poverty.
Few human souls have loved birds as much as did John James Audubon (1785–1851), the namesake of a leading conservation organization. But, as we approach the 235th anniversary of his birth on April 26, his treatment of birds may shock us.
Audubon shot thousands and thousands of birds. The ones he wished to later paint he took apart with his own hands, wrote William Souder in his 2004 biography, “Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America.” Audubon would patiently skin birds. He would ease flesh out of wings and bones from legs. Then he would stuff the remaining shells to serve as models.
A man of his times, Audubon hunted for food and for sport. His notes about his field work included observations about which kinds of birds were tastier than others.
“At one time or other, Audubon killed specimens of all but a handful of the more than four hundred species of birds he ultimately painted, “ Souder wrote. “He recognized and often speculated about the impact overhunting could have on wildlife populations. But he was never deterred. He sometimes said a day in which he killed fewer than a hundred birds was a day wasted,”
Audubon immersed himself deeply in his studies of birds after failing as a frontier merchant in Kentucky. Lacking much formal training in either art or science, Audubon in time develop a style that eclipsed other naturalists of his era.
In a 2014 lecture titled “John James Audubon: Life-Sized and Larger than Life,” Ben Weiss of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) contrasted Audubon’s approach with that of an earlier pioneer in American ornithology.
Mark Catesby (1683–1749) and Audubon used the same elements in their depictions of the Carolina parrot. We see how these birds, now extinct, looked. We see their chief food supply, cocklebur plants. Below is Catesby’s Carolina parrot, standing on a branch.
But Audubon wanted to give his viewers more than a glimpse of this bird. He wanted them to understand how these parrots lived. In his MFA lecture, Weiss read a passage from Audubon’s own description of the Carolina parrots:
“They are quite at ease on trees or any kind of plant, moving sidewise, climbing or hanging in every imaginable posture, assisting themselves very dexterously in all their motions with their bills. They usually alight extremely close together. I have seen branches of trees as completely covered by them as they could possibly be.”
Now let’s take a look at Audubon’s painting of Carolina parrots.
Audubon gives us busy and engaging creatures, socializing and almost inviting you into their play.
“He is taking you to what he saw,” Weiss said. “Catesby gives you a specimen. Audubon gives you an experience.”
The Carolina parrots were quite a menace to farmers in their day. But you may look at Catesby’s parrot and think about how sad extinction is.
Audubon makes us mourn our own loss. We will never see these capable and merry-looking birds in life.
Kentucky Storyteller
Catesby was one of several naturalists to publish books on American birds before Audubon, but Audubon’s is the most famous — and for good reasons.
Working with collaborators, Audubon created hundreds of portraits of birds set in their natural homes. He showed a clear talent as a storyteller in his “Birds of America,” first printed in installments from 1827 to 1838.
The original version of “Birds of America” reproduced Audubon’s drawing in their full glory. It is a behemoth of book, with more than 430 prints on pages each running about 39 inches by 26 inches.
Audubon favored a kind of paper known as double elephant folio. He could draw his life-size birds on these giant pages. With larger birds, Audubon posed them as if they were going about their business, but in a way that conveniently fit the page. The print below makes you wonder what the heron is seeking in that shallow water.
The giant pages also gave Audubon room to sometimes tell more complex stories when painting smaller birds. On the page shown below, mockingbirds fend off an attack on a nest by a snake.
Audubon wanted to show how mockingbirds band together to fend off intruders. He wrote:
“Different species of snakes ascend to their nests, and generally suck the eggs or swallow the young; but on all such occasions, not only the pair to which the nest belongs, but many other Mocking-birds from the vicinity, fly to the spot, attack the reptiles, and, in some cases, are so fortunate as either to force them to retreat, or deprive them of life.”
To me, the birds in this painting look fierce and determined.
Sure, the bird directly in front of the snake’s fangs looks frightened, as seen below. But the one behind the snake head is on the attack. These little birds may get the better of the snake in the end.
Descriptions of this painting sometimes refer to the birds as being scared. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were startled. It would be rather unusual for a rattlesnake to attack a nest, as Aubudon shows.
Snakes sometimes do make their way up trees in search of mockingbird eggs — but these tend to be slimmer species, Souder wrote in his biography of Audubon. Audubon may have seen a black snake attack a mockingbird nest. He instead painted this scene as if a rattlesnake had done so. Rattlesnakes can climb trees, but they are stouter than other kinds of snakes, making this more difficult for them, Souder said.
Audubon comes across an odd mix of meticulous chronicler and fabulist. We have an artist who at times acts as if he were a journalist or scientist, painstakingly keeping his work true to life. To get the proportions of his birds exactly right, he built grids of wire. He then impaled and arranged his bird specimens on these grids.
But Audubon was a showman at heart. He would at times abandon the truth to entertain his audience. A rattlesnake is more impressive and frightening than a plain old black snake. So Audubon painted a rattler attacking the mockingbird nest.
Audubon was in his early 20s when he first reached the American frontier, but he adapted to its ways. He had what Souder described in his biography of Audubon as “a Kentuckian’s knack for tall tales.” In an interview with the National Portrait Gallery, Souder noted that the painter had been born Jean Rabin. His name shifted around a bit before he settled on the one under which he is best known.
“In pretending he was John James Audubon when he got to this country, he was free to invent who that person was,” Souder told the National Portrait Gallery in an interview. “And except for his absolute honesty in portraying birds, Audubon was always an unreliable narrator. That makes him tricky to know — something that is tempting to a biographer.”
A Very American Life Story That Begins Abroad
I highly recommend Souder’s book and the MFA lecture by Weiss, for which there is a link in the bibliography at the end of this essay. Here is one of my favorite lines from the lecture on Audubon:
“His personal story is frankly a very American one, not least of which in the sense that he was coming from somewhere else,” Weiss said.
The painter was born in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, on April 26, 1785. He was said to be the child of two French parents, chambermaid Jeanne Rabin and naval officer Lieutenant Jean Audubon. Audubon’s romantic life was complex. He already had a wife in France and another family in Saint-Domingue with a woman of mixed European and African ancestry.
In time, Jean Audubon realized the white planters of Saint-Domingue might be due for reprisals for their incredibly harsh treatment of slaves. He relocated the boy, then known as Jean Rabin, and another of his children born in Saint-Domingue, a fair-skinned daughter, to France. The two children were raised there by his wife, Anne Moynet Audubon, and formally adopted by the couple. They renamed the boy Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon. He did a stint of naval officer training as a young man. He failed in that, in part due to a propensity for sea sickness.
Around 1803, as Napoleon was conscripting young men for his army, lead ore was discovered around a Pennsylvania property in which the senior Jean Audubon held a stake. Intent on sparing his son from military service, Audubon shipped him off to the United States with false identity papers. These claimed the young man, now called John James Audubon, had been born in Louisiana, which was being integrated into the United States. Napoleon sold Louisiana and other French holdings to the United States in 1803 for a bargain price. He largely gave up on North America after suffering defeats in his efforts to regain control of Saint-Domingue after revolts there.
Audubon’s journey to Pennsylvania proved most important in that it allowed him to meet the woman whom he would marry, Lucy Bakewell. Lucy would prove a devoted and capable supporter of her husband’s study of birds through their more than four decades of married life, which started in Kentucky.
There Audubon felt the call of the woods more strongly than an interest in the stores and businesses he helped run. He loved to track and shoot birds and then restore them to some semblance of life on the page. By the time the Audubons traveled back to Pennsylvania for a visit in 1812, he had built up a collection of more than 200 drawings. During this visit to Pennsylvania, Audubon became a U.S. citizen.
The return to Kentucky brought a great shock for the budding artist.
Rats had nested in the chest where Audubon stored his drawings and ruined many of them. The loss marked a turning point in Audubon’s life, Souder wrote. After a few sleepless days, Audubon gathered his gun and his pencils and returned to the woods to begin again.
“Quickening his pace over the brittle leaves, Audubon told himself he was lucky. He had lost a treasure beyond calculation. But fortune had invited him to remake his drawings. He would make them even better now,” Souder wrote.
Drawing birds was clearly more than a hobby for Audubon. Still, for many years, he continued tending in his offhand manner to a growing business. The young couple enjoyed a taste of prosperity. There was a time when they filled their home in Henderson, Kentucky, with “music and books and lively talk of commerce and nature,” Souder wrote.
A mix of Audubon’s bad decisions and the larger ripples of national economic setbacks, including the Panic of 1819, would force the family from its home. Audubon’s subsequent legal troubles included an assault charge. He also was briefly jailed for unpaid loans and subsequent filed for bankruptcy.
With no other alternatives, Audubon turned to drawing portraits to support his growing family. He and Lucy would have two sons who survived in their adult years. Lucy took up several teaching positions to support the family, moving in time to Louisiana. The Audubons would not have a family home again for many years.
“The failure of his businesses in Henderson had plunged the family into poverty for nearly a decade, a period during which Audubon was mostly absent and making little more than token contributions to their support,” Souder wrote.
Wolfskin Coat
Audubon finally met with success in the United Kingdom in 1826. He earlier had wandered and taught in the United States, taking positions in Ohio and Louisiana and visiting many other states. He continually worked on his paintings of birds, improving his technique.
He stuck with his vision even after suffering an embarrassing defeat in 1824 in Philadelphia. The city’s Academy of Natural Sciences rejected him as a member. A fellow ornithologist George Ord emerged there as an early critic of Audubon’s work, finding it excessively theatrical and sometimes scant on facts.
But it was Audubon’s talent for showmanship that helped stir interest abroad in America’s birds. At the urging of his initial U.K. partner, engraver William Home Lizars, Audubon agreed to let artist John Syme paint his portrait. It shows Audubon in a wolfskin coat, holding a gun across his chest.
Europeans were intrigued by the notion of American frontiersmen.
Boston-born Ben Franklin, who spent his much of adult life as a printer and writer in Philadelphia, famously borrowed the trappings of a woodsman. He sported a coonskin cap during his time as ambassador to France (1776–1785). John Adams complained in letters to his wife about what he considered Franklin’s ridiculous attire. But Franklin used his hat to help sell the idea of America to the French, whose aid the rebellious colonists desperately needed.
Audubon certainly had more of a right to sport a wolfskin coat for a portrait, even one painted in Scotland, than Franklin did to a coonskin cap. Audubon had spent many days tramping through the wilds of America.
But, like Franklin, he had a story to tell about the United States. Audubon’s “Birds of America” brought his adopted homeland into the imagination of people living around the world.
Think again about that depiction of Audubon’s early loss of his paintings. Working in the 1870s, this artist working in Japan chose as his subject a domestic mishap suffered in Henderson, Kentucky about 60 years earlier.
Audubon’s value as a showman was lost on his critics, especially those who championed other more meticulous ornithologists.
“George Ord, who in so many ways saw through Audubon without being able to see what he had accomplished, was wrong in his belief that the prints would be worthless and fade from memory. The Birds of America is one of the most revered and highly valued of American artworks,” Souder wrote.
In 2010, a complete early edition of “Birds of America” sold for more than $10 million, making it the world’s most expensive printed book.
For more details on the sources used in writing this essay, see this bibliography.
