John James Audubon

Evan Gregoire

English 379

Prof. Nichols

May 11, 2009

John James Audubon: Defining the Man

- The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear.

It is difficult for a modern citizen of the world to imagine the power of a frontier. The awe-inspiring combination of a passion for discovery, coupled with a fear of the unknown. As the human population on the earth swells, what is known as frontier diminishes and eventually fades away as humans explore even the most remote caverns of the globe. The time for exploration has passed. Thankfully this truth did not hold during the time of John James Audubon, who came to America during a time when documenting unspoiled American wilderness was still a possibility. Audubon’s early appreciation for ornithology remained a focal point for the duration of his life. Although he is recognized as a conservationism pioneer, Audubon’s original intentions were unrelated. His goal was to find and paint every known North American bird. His attributes as a frontiersman, marksman, scientist, and artist created the hundreds of stunning paintings and prints displayed in Audubon’s Birds of America, which was first published in 1826. As Thoreau dictated, “We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes” (Thoreau 344). Audubon would have embraced these words as a testament to his life’s work. This true ornithologist held the values of life in high regard. His ability to successfully recreate life through his paintings is an under appreciated gift, and it is what defined Audubon.

This love of life extends past the physical beauty of the birds he studied. Audubon did not practice a “catch and release” policy during his voyages into the frontier. His “trigger itch” as Aldo Leopold would label it, was insatiable. Far more animals, and birds especially, fell to Audubon’s gunshot than were needed for his research. During travel, Audubon would more often than not find himself out of reach from the civilized society of the nineteenth century. His skill and expertise as the American woodsman made killing, cleaning, and eating many of the birds on his list very manageable.

However, this does not overshadow Audubon’s negative impact on the environment he claimed as home. His journal entries throughout his travels indicate a heightened awareness of the global impact on the natural elements of the earth. During an excursion into the cold wild of Labrador in 1933, Audubon commented upon the “the chillness of the air” which “was so peculiarly penetrating, that it brought to the mind a fearful anxiety for the future. The absence of trees, properly so called, the barren aspect of all around, the sombre mantle of the mountainous distance that hung along the horizon, excited the most melancholy feelings” (Audubon, 442). The inner conservationist that Audubon begins to discover displays an immense amount of passion for the land that he has lived off of, and the land that he has studied and cherished his whole life. However, it is only after much of his life has been lived that he makes these realizations. Audubon lived a colored past.

Audubon was the illegitimate son of Jean Audubon, an enterprising French Sea captain “who, after reverses in Les Cayes, where he owned property, returned to France with the boy” (Peterson, Introduction). The sea faring father took Audubon back to France to be raised by his legal wife, who cared for him as if he was her own. The infant Audubon’s mother was actually a young French lady by the name of Mademoiselle Rabin, who Jean Audubon met in Santo Domingo; the isle of Audubon’s birth (Murphy, 338). The young boy grew under the steady supervision of his loving stepmother, as well as under the guidance of a “young gentleman’s tutoring” (Peterson, Introduction) that he received in France.

The young explorer to be begins his travels at the impressionable age of eighteen, when his father sent him to live on a piece of property he owned in Mill Grove Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. The nature of this move is contested. Did Captain Audubon send him away to escape the ignominy of illegitimacy, or was it to escape conscription in Napoleon’s army? Regardless of the answer, after Audubon jumped the pond, he sealed his own future. Upon entry to the United States and after seeing the beauty enveloping his new home, Audubon was seized with rapture. The obsession with birds began not long after, and he nursed this love his whole life. Before he could fully devote himself to the wildness of the rugged and undeveloped landscape of the new world, Audubon realized other needs. He became engaged to his neighbor in Mill Grove, Lucy Bakewell, and the couple almost immediately moved westward and settled in Louisville, Kentucky. Jean Audubon had business plans prearranged in Louisville for his son. Unfortunately, the War of 1812 came at the most inopportune time for the Audubon family, who were attempting to operate a frontier trade business. Audubon had already sunk “most of his ready capital into a trading firm that never opened its doors, the transatlantic embargoes of the early nineteenth century hastened the downfall of Audubon’s ambitions as a frontier merchant” (Faherty, 172). The rarity of income due to the war prompted Audubon to begin painting on the side, charging clients for portrait paintings (Sheehan 87). Although the war of 1812 only lasted three years, and the boom of American prosperity in 1815 was “little solace to those ruined by the ripple effects of crippling embargoes” (Faherty, 172) such as Audubon and his family. As the young nation began to return to pre-war comfort, Audubon found himself in debtors prison in 1819. It was in the March of 1820 when Audubon realized that life in Louisville would no longer be supportable with odd jobs as his only source of income. After his failure as a businessman and shopkeeper, Audubon’s amateur naturalism began to receive more attention after his release from prison. Audubon made several trips to Cincinnati in search of prosperity as an artist before moving there in mid 1820 in attempt to start fresh and escape the poverty his family in Kentucky. It was in this new city where Audubon began giving serious thought about professionalizing his hobby. Even though his attempts at a modest frontier businessman failed and landed Audubon in prison, this is not due to his prowess as a businessman or tradesman. Audubon’s organizational skills, dedication, and passion are what drove the artist to publish his greatest work in his later life. Yes his trade business failed, yet so did “nearly every other business in the trans-Appalachian West, in the wake of an economic disaster that was beyond his control” (Rhodes, 404). The path that Audubon’s career took after leaving Louisville and the success he found pursuing his dream are testaments to his character.

After finally securing a platform in Cincinnati from which to continue working, Audubon set out to expand what little bird portraits he did have into the massive project he envisioned. When Audubon announced to his family the plans of his expedition, an eight-month span was all he expected to be absent for. This estimation was wildly inaccurate. Audubon spent the next decade of his life in a perpetual state of exploration in the wild. The few ornithological paintings that he had amassed quickly grew. Audubon maintained a very strict style of artistic expression. For this project Audubon had focused all of his energy into the avian influence he felt during his time in the wild. Some of his birds were lucky enough to deserve a background; most specimens were always painted on starkly contrasting white backgrounds. The blankness behind the birds noticeably lifts “them out of a more complex habitat where they are known only differentially, but it also outlines their impermanence” (New, 407) Yet even with this very basic approach to his art, Audubon was able to capture the intensity and vivacity of the life that burned within each bird he painted. Even though the birds had been shot, killed, examined, posed with wiring before ever reaching the canvas, the potency exhibited in the animals proved amazingly captivating.

The magnetism that Audubon was able to achieve was made possible by the unique circumstances under which he worked. In order to paint a bird, he had to first shoot and kill it. He would then prop the animal into various poses with wiring before he painted the final product. What separated Audubon from ornithologists similar to him were the poses in which he placed his birds. An Audubon plate “records the visual event he called a ‘sighting,’ where eye and world seem to mingle substance and reverie” (New, 400). These “sightings” represent to Audubon the first thrill of discovering a new specimen. The ornithologist trekked the massive western frontier of America through completely alien lands for nearly ten years. New bird sightings proved monumental under the stresses of the life of a frontiersman. Audubon took those emotions and channeled them into his prints, capturing his birds in “highly stylized glimpses of nature” (New, 400) that Aldo Leopold would admire. In Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, specific references are made to this moment in time and space where the seconds last just a beat longer, and the suns rays slow down before reaching the earth with a hot, cloaking heaviness. Audubon is most certainly excluded when Leopold pities the “luckless” who “have never stood, gun empty and mouth agape, to watch the golden needles come sifting down, while the feathery rocket that knocked them off sails unscathed into the jackpines” (Leopold, 58). A Ruffed Grouse is the “feathery rocket” that expels itself from danger in Leopold’s journal. These animals have been documented relatively early in Audubon’s collection. Game laws during his time were relaxed on these grouse (also known as “pheasant” or “partridge” in New England), and Audubon hunted them freely year round (Peterson, 120). Although they may have been his favorite bird to bag, the artist in the man can be seen at his full potential in other, more rarely seen scenes of action. During his time spent in the American south, Audubon came across the nest of a Brown Thrasher (Ferruginous Mocking-bird) under the attack of a coiled three to four foot snake. The painting recreates the scene precisely. The snake is coiled around the rough bark that covers the branches housing the nest; his head snaked menacingly above the nest full of opaque and delicate eggs. The female lays limply in the coils of the snake’s torso as her mate frantically exerts all his efforts to extricate her. Above the nest and swooping from the white beyond is another male bird of the same species, answering the calls of fright and panic resonating from the nest. This foreign aid is poised with beak agape “prepared to strike a vengeful blow at the reptile, his bright eye glancing hatred at his foe” (Audubon, 441). Still, a third Thrasher is latched to a branch near the snake, biting the flesh of the beast and tearing it from its body! The snake is a menacing black with a silver scaled underside. The snake wraps itself around the cylindrical safety of the comfortable nest, in which four Brown Thrasher eggs remain unharmed. The nest rests in a soft bed of wide leaves, green and vibrant with health. The Thrashers that remain in the nest, including the injured female, are the softest of cream-colored browns, accented with darker spots of plumage along the breast. The outstretched wings, opened and flapping in a menacing despair are a gentle gray underneath. The final Thrasher who is plunging onto the snake reveals his deep velvet caramel colored outer plumage that remains monochromatic along the entirety of the bird, save for a pair of matching white streaks along the wings. Audubon exclaims that the “snake was finally conquered, and a jubilee held over its carcass by a crowd of Thrushes and other birds, until the woods resounded with their notes of exultation” (Audubon, 441), despite the loss of the eggs, the destruction of the nest, and the imminent danger of the life of the female. Moments such as these do not seem trapped by the same principles of time humans have lashed themselves to. They stand alone, in a metaphysical electric medium between the two worlds. Moments such as these are what Audubon strove to achieve in his paintings. He did not look to represent the life of the bird, nor the life of the viewer, but he sought rather “the somatic poetry of their relation.” Audubon sought to portray his plates “as a hunter might hold an animal tense in her sights, her attention narrowing to a bead” (New, 402). Audubon’s precise anatomic detail and colorful spread of mediums such as watercolor, charcoal, pencil, and even oil paints were used in the creation of a print. The artist is able to depict his amazing avian specimens in an often violent display of force or power that draws men like Audubon to the wild. He creates a frame of anticipatory time that exists “when the world hangs pendulous in a sighting, not stilled so much as fluidly suspended and thus kinetic with an incipience of action” (New, 400). These attributes gained Audubon a great deal of fame overseas. As his portfolio of now hundreds of wild North American birds began to swell, Audubon began searching for an interested publisher or patron. It is important to remember that the Audubon still faced rough economic times. While John James spent the past six years in the wilderness of North America, Lucy Audubon supported her two sons by teaching in Cincinnati. Times were indeed desperate. When Audubon petitioned for membership in the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences in attempt to establish himself, he was met with stubborn opposition. The chief executor to esteemed ornithologist Alexander Wilson, George Ord “held enormous sway in the Philadelphia-based American scientific community and continually denigrated Audubon’s work, arguing that it was less scientifically accurate than Wilson’s American Ornithology” (Faherty, 175). Ord further mocked Audubon as an unkempt buffoon who was unfamiliar with the proper means of using the scientific method. Audubon’s application for membership into the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences was accordingly lobbied against by Ord, who was successful in swaying the vote against Audubon’s favor. Disgusted by the lack of domestic support for a project distinctly North American, Audubon began preparations to move his portfolio abroad to search for a competent and willing engraver. Six years after his monumental decision to track down his dreams and paint the birds he loved, Audubon found himself on a boat to England in 1826. The English received him warmly, and before long Audubon was enveloped in an upper class audience yearning for a taste of his natural representations of the American wild. The new host of English naturalists he found himself amongst embraced the same outdoorsman persona that Audubon had failed to popularize in the United States. He continued to wear his hair long and over his shoulders, sporting furs and leather in true American frontiersman fashion. It was in this manner that Audubon carried himself through the foreign nation, in “search for an engraver capable of reproducing his pictures” (Wechsler, 18). Audubon turned a small profit by producing several canvas versions of some of his prints while the hunt for the engraver carried on. He finally was fortunate enough to meet with “Robert Havell Sr., who was carrying on the aquatinting traditions of Sandby, the Maltons, Daniells and earlier members of his own family. Havell was fascinated by Audubon’s accomplishment but felt himself too old to undertake so colossal a task” (Wechsler, 18) and immediately prompted his ambitious son, Robert Havell Jr., to embark on the engraving of the immense project.

Once the entirety of Audubon’s collection up to that point had started the engraving process, it was time for the painter to play the role of author. Under British law since 1709, all publications that desired the title of a proper book must have letterpress to accompany any illustrations. British law also stated that if Audubon were to combine his text as well as his paintings between the same covers, he would be thus required to “deposit a copy of the work in each of nine libraries in the United Kingdom” (Peterson, Introduction). This process would have undoubtedly deteriorated the progress of the publication as a whole, and Audubon deemed it unnecessary. Instead creating a caption based text, Audubon printed his famous double-elephant folio The Birds of America, which measured an astonishing thirty by forty inches, separately from the texts. The massive size of this publication is due to the artist’s incessant devotion to perfection, and life size was the only size he saw fit. The accompanying literature was published in The Ornithological Biography, or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States in five separate volumes. The sheer volume of required printed materials displays the gravity and value of such a project as a true story of American perseverance and success.