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AUDUBON'S AMERICA
Few Americans have been so powerfully and dramatically shaped by the land as John James Audubon. And no American has
portrayed the country's natural history in as monumental a work of art as Audubon has.
As a boy in France, instead of going to school Audubon often went to the fields around his father's estate in the Loire
Valley to hunt and fish and collect what he called"curiosities:" birds' nests and eggs, lichens, flowers, even rocks.
When his father learned the boy was skipping school he put him in boarding school; but there too he found ways to spend so
much time out-of-doors, studying birds, that he soon had a collection of 200 drawings.
When he came to America at 18 to avoid conscription into Napoleon's army and to manage, Mill Grove, his father's Pennsylvania
estate near Valley Forge, Audubon was delighted by the vast American forest, teeming with wildlife. He said, "Hunting,
fishing, drawing . . . occupied my every moment. I seldom passed a day without drawing a bird, or noting something respecting
their habits."
About a typical day, he once wrote: "The sky was serene, the air perfumed, and thousands of melodious notes from
birds unknown to me urged me to arise and go in pursuit of those beautiful and happy creatures. Then I would find myself
furnished with large and powerful wings, and cleaving the air like an eagle, I would fly off and by a few joyous bounds overtake
the objects of my desire." Audubon's pursuit of birds across the landscape made him feel like one of the "winged
people" himself.
In the end, Audubon painted 435 American birds -- all of them life-size. Then in an equally demanding undertaking he
published them in "double elephant" folio pages that measured nearly 30 by 40 inches. His monumental book, "The
Birds of America", sold by subscription and was delivered to buyers between 1827 and 1838, five plates at a time as soon
as they were printed and individually hand colored. Subscribers paid just over $1,000 for all four volumes. A complete set
was sold recently at auction for $8 million.
Audubon put his whole soul and a vast store of energy into his art. But, the most immediate cause that forced him to
begin his life-work was failure. When his business on the frontier in Kentucky failed, Audubon, married, and a father of
two boy, was suddenly arrested and jailed for a debt of $50,000. A declaration of bankruptcy got him released from jail and
brought the realization that he had to find some satisfying work he could do successfully.
Within months, Audubon, 35, decided to pursue his passion for birds and try to make a living at it. He already had a
portfolio of nearly 200 drawings made since coming to America. Some were of birds he found near Mill Grove; others were from
his travels on the Ohio and from the woods around his frontier home in Kentucky. All were labeled "Drawn from Nature
by J. J. Audubon." Many, he knew, would have to be drawn again after more careful study. Hundreds more birds would
have to be discovered before they could be painted.
For six years, while his wife, Lucy, taught school to support the boys and he painted portraits to support himself, Audubon
traveled the country. He floated down the Mississippi on a flatboat, with his eyes on the great flyway overhead. He hunted
birds through the bayou country around New Orleans. He went back East to study painting and while there traveled to Niagara
Falls and then on to the Great Lakes where he observed the fall migration and drew shore birds. Soon he floated down the
Mississippi again, thinking "every bird enlarges my collection," but also thinking "My best friends regard
me as a madman." Finally, he painted his most famous bird: the wild turkey cock and saw that his abilities were equal
to the task he proposed.
After six years, Audubon, 41, judged that his collection of 250 paintings was large enough for him to sail to England
to look for an engraver and subscribers. There he dressed as the American woodsman he was in a wolf-skin coat. He looked
like he had stepped right out of one of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstockings tales. The English loved it and Audubon soon
found subscribers and an engraver willing to print his birds life-size.
While the engraver worked away in London, Audubon returned to America at every opportunity to collect more birds. He
traveled to Camden and Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey, and the Great Pine Forest, Pennsylvania, then to Charleston, South Carolina,
where he became friends with the minister/naturalist, John Bachman, before going on to hunt for tropical birds in Florida.
After Florida he went back East and sailed out of Eastport, Maine, for a summer in Labrador where he found northern birds
in abundance. After a cold summer in Labrador, he wintered again in Charleston, traveled once more to Florida, this time
to Pensacola and on to New Orleans and Houston, before finally returning to England to see the fourth volume of The Birds
of America published in 1838.
Almost no American of the time had seen as much of the country as Audubon. In 1842 with money earned from The Birds of
America, he built a house in upper Manhattan on the Hudson River and settled down for a year. He and his friend Bachman were
planning a book about quadrupeds, and in 1843 Audubon traveled to St. Louis and then up the Missouri to its confluence with
the Yellowstone at Fort Union in present day North Dakota. There he painted all the four leggeds he could find: bison, elk,
bighorn sheep, coyote, prairie dogs and more. The Quadrupeds of North America appeared in three folio volumes of 150 prints.
Audubon's Birds and Quadrupeds showed Americans the animals of their land, but Audubon did more than that. For the Birds
he wrote five volumes of what he called 'Bird Biographies, ' giving the story of each bird's habits and habitat. The books
are not just natural science descriptions but include popular narratives about the landscape as well as. Bachman wrote the
three volumes of natural science that accompanies the Quadrupeds but he included much of Audubon's book-length Missouri River
Journals. Audubon's voluminous writing gives an astonishingly articulate voice to the American land. In Audubon, the land
itself spoke and still speaks to Americans.
QUOTATIONS BY AUDUBON
A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given
by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.
Almost every day, instead of going to school, I made for the
fields, where I spent my day... Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment. Cares I knew not, and cared
naught about them.
How could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books?
I feel fully decided that we should all go to Europe together and to work as if an established Partnership for Life
consisting of Husband Wife and Children.
I wish I had eight pairs of hands, and another body to shoot the specimens.
In my deepest troubles, I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me and retire to some secluded
part of our noble forests.
My drawings at first were made altogether in watercolors, but they wanted softness
and a great deal of finish.
The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear.
To have been torn from the study would have been as death; my time was entirely occupied with art.
I never
for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best
way I could.
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