(From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes,...)
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes, the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years, and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world. Rhodes shows us young Audubon arriving in New York from France in 1803, his illegitimacy a painful secret, speaking no English but already drawing and observing birds. We see him falling in love, marrying the wellborn English girl next door, crossing the Appalachians to frontier Kentucky to start a new life, fashioning himself into an American just as his adopted country was finding its identity. Here is Audubon exploring the wilderness of birds-pelicans wading the shallows of interior rivers, songbirds flocking, passenger pigeons darkening the skies-and teaching himself to revivify them in glorious life-size images.
(The Birds of America is a book by naturalist and painter ...)
The Birds of America is a book by naturalist and painter John James Audubon, containing illustrations of a wide variety of birds of the United States. It was first published as a series in sections between 1827 and 1838, in Edinburgh and London.
(John James Audubon’s lively and colorful writings about t...)
John James Audubon’s lively and colorful writings about the American wilderness reintroduces the great artist and ornithologist as an exceptional American writer, a predecessor to Thoreau, Emerson, and Melville.
(The breathtaking art of John James Audubon’s Birds of Ame...)
The breathtaking art of John James Audubon’s Birds of America has been celebrated throughout the world since it first appeared over 150 years ago. Less well known is Audubon’s literary legacy: the magnificent volumes of natural history he published during his lifetime, as well as the remarkable journals, memoirs, and letters left behind at his death. In this unprecedented collection from The Library of America, Audubon the great nature writer takes his rightful place alongside Audubon the artist. Here is the most comprehensive selection of Audubon’s writings ever published, along with a spectacular portfolio of his drawings.
(Historians, biographers, and scholars of John James Audub...)
Historians, biographers, and scholars of John James Audubon and natural history have long been mystified by Audubon’s 1843 Missouri River expedition, for his journals of the trip were thought to have been destroyed by his granddaughter Maria Rebecca Audubon. Daniel Patterson is the first scholar to locate and assemble three important fragments of the 1843 Missouri River journals, and here he offers a stunning transcription and critical edition of Audubon’s last journey through the American West.
John James Audubon was an American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. He is known for his studies and detailed illustrations of North American birds. His seminal "Birds of America," a collection of 435 life-size prints, quickly eclipsed Wilson's work and is still a standard against which 20th and 21st-century bird artists, such as Roger Tory Peterson and David Sibley, are measured.
Background
John James Audubon, born Jean Rabin, was born on April 26, 1785 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). He was an illegitimate son of a French naval officer/plantation owner, Jean Audubon, and a chambermaid named Jeanne Rabin, who died soon after he was born.
In 1791, after Jean Audubon had returned to live in France, he arranged for his son and another illegitimate child to be sent there so he could formally adopt them. Jean Rabin was renamed, Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon.
Father's wife, Anne Moynet Audubon, adopted him and brought up. Audubon also had a half-sister. Her name was Muguet. In his early years, at least, he was, by his own admission, a great sportsman, killing for amusement as well as food, and he remained a hunter even after he had achieved a reputation as an ornithologist.
Only to the middle period of his life, too, belongs the familiar picture of Audubon as a pioneer; in his early years he roamed the placid Pennsylvania countryside in satin pumps and silk breeches. Nevertheless, it was during this period that he began his studies of American birdlife.
Education
Audubon's education was that of a well-to-do young bourgeois; he was instructed in mathematics, geography, music, and fencing, but his father, occupied with the affairs of the Republic, left the supervision of the boy's studies to the indulgent stepmother, with the result that the formal schooling was sometimes neglected.
By the time he was fifteen had begun a collection of his original drawings of French birds. Recognizing the boy's lack of discipline, his father put him into a military school for a year, but the experience did not have much permanent effect, and, having always encouraged the lad's taste for natural history and drawing, in 1802-03 Jean Audubon enabled him to study drawing for a few months under David at Paris.
Career
In April 1804, John James Audubon made the first 'banding' experiment on the young of an American wild bird.
After a year, during which he may have served for a time in the French navy, in 1806 he formed a partnership with Ferdinand Rozier, the son of one of his father's business associates, and returned to America.
For a time they tried without success to operate the lead mine, then sold the Audubon interest in Mill Grove; Rozier found a position in Philadelphia, and Audubon entered Benjamin Bakewell's counting-house in New York.
In August 1807 the partners decided to seek their fortunes in the West, bought a stock of goods in New York, and went to Louisville, where they opened a general store. Although the business suffered somewhat as a result of the Embargo Act, Audubon went to Philadelphia in June 1808.
In Kentucky, then almost a wilderness, Audubon's penchant for natural history had fresh scope and encouragement, and, entirely out of touch with other ornithologists, working as an artist and a lover of nature more than as a scientist, he went on with his bird paintings. But his interest in mercantile affairs was not sufficient to win success against the competition in the growing town of Louisville
In the spring of 1810 he and Rozier loaded their goods on a flatboat and floated 125 miles down Ohio to Henderson, Kentucky.
The business partnership with Rozier was not a success, so after another fruitless venture it was dissolved, though the friendship continued. Audubon then, in association with his brother-in-law, Thomas Bakewell, and others, attempted successively several different enterprises, the last being a steam grist and lumber mill, at Henderson, which was too elaborate for the needs of the new country and failed in 1819.
Audubon, the heaviest loser, was jailed for debt but was released on the plea of bankruptcy with only the clothes he wore, his gun, and his original drawings. This disaster ended his business career.
In the winter of 1819-1820, he took his family to Cincinnati, where he became a taxidermist in the new Western Museum, just founded by Dr. Daniel Drake. By spring 1820, Drake's museum owed Audubon $1,200, most of which it never paid. The artist scraped together such funds as he could raise from drawing and teaching art to support Lucy and their two boys, then 11 and 8, who moved in with relatives again while he left to claim his future. He recruited his best student, 18-year-old Joseph Mason, to draw backgrounds, bartered his hunting skills for boat passage on a commercial flatboat headed for New Orleans, and in October floated off down Ohio and the Mississippi.
In 1824 Audubon made a journey to Philadelphia, in search of a publisher. He was encouraged by C. L. Bonaparte, and by Thomas Sully, who gave him lessons in the use of oils but encountered the opposition of the friends of Alexander Wilson, under the leadership of George Ord.
In 1827 he went to London, with many letters of introduction but was not so enthusiastically received as he had been at Edinburgh, though at last the king subscribed for his books and set the fashion in his favor.
In October 1830 John and Mrs. Audubon settled temporarily in Edinburgh, where he began the work on the text of his Birds of America, to be called Ornithological Biography.
Edinburgh publishers would offer nothing for the first volume, so it was published in 1831 at Audubon's expense, and although several competing works appeared at about the same time.
His first American notice had appeared in the American Journal of Science in 1829; in November 1830, upon the nomination of Edward Everett, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy, and in 1832 was the subject of the first of a series of able articles by W. B. O. Peabody in the North American Review.
In 1834 Audubon went back to Edinburgh to continue his work on the "Ornithological Biography." Havell issued the last part of the Birds of America in June 1838, completing the work begun in Edinburgh in 1826; the concluding volume (vol. V) of the "Ornithological Biography" appeared in May of the next year, followed, in the summer, by the Synopsis of the "Birds of North America," a methodical catalog of the birds then known, prepared with the efficient help of MacGillivray. The great work finished, Audubon returned to America, began work on a "miniature edition" of the Birds, and almost immediately undertook the preparation, in collaboration with John Bachman, of "The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America."
In 1841 Audubon bought land on the Hudson, and the next year settled finally on his estate, "Minnies' Land," which is now Audubon Park, New York City. With old age came a kindly attitude toward his former rivals; he was the adviser and encourager of young scientists (notably Spencer F. Baird, who had begun a correspondence with Audubon at the age of seventeen), the revered and adored sage, and patron saint of the birds.
His latter years, indeed, accorded closely with the popular legend that has grown up about him, so that at the time of his death in January 1851 the real man was already merged in the traditional Audubon of romance. Audubon's powers had failed in the last few years, and the completion of the Quadrupeds for which he had finished about half of the large drawings was left to his sons.
In 1826, Audubon presented an "Account of the Habits of the Turkey Buzzard... with the view of exploding the opinion generally entertained of its extraordinary power of Smelling" at the Wernerian Natural History Society in Edinburgh. Audubon described how he could sneak up very close behind a vulture and it wouldn't fly away until he showed himself. He then ran experiments. In the first, he filled a deerskin with grass to approximate a recently deceased animal and observed a vulture attack the odorless prey. In the second, he hid a putrefying hog carcass in some grass, and no vulture found it, even though the stench prevented Audubon from getting within 30 yards of it.
Most of the Edinburgh crowd agreed with Audubon, but eccentric explorer and naturalist Charles Waterton demurred. Waterton had written of his own experiments in which turkey vultures would take away lizards and frogs "as soon as they began to stink." But, according to zoologist Lucy Cooke, Waterton "was said to have a habit of hiding under the table at dinner parties to bite his guests' legs like a dog, and delighted in elaborate, taxidermy-based practical jokes. A particularly inspired prank involved his fashioning an effigy of one of his (many) enemies out of a howler monkey's buttocks."
Bird-banding has been used for centuries to study birds and their travels (the earliest known use dates back to Roman times), but Audubon is the first person known to use the process in the Americas. He tied yarn (some say thin silver wire) to the legs of Eastern Phoebes, monitored their movements, and discovered that this species returns to nest in the same spot each year.
Audubon is credited with discovering around 25 species and 12 subspecies, but some of his other birds were later identified as being either immature birds or sexually dimorphic specimens. Beyond these, there are five "mystery birds" that appear nowhere but in Audubon's watercolors: the carbonated swamp warbler, Cuvier's kinglet, Townsend's finch (or Townsend's bunting), small-headed flycatcher, and blue mountain warbler. The Audubon Society also includes the Bartram's vireo in the list. These unidentifiable birds were probably hybrids of known birds with aberrant colorations.
Quotations:
"As I grow up I was fervently desirous of becoming acquainted with Nature."
"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children."
"When the bird and the book disagree, believe the bird."
"Never give up listening to the sounds of birds."
"Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment. Cares I knew not, and cared naught about them."
"If only the bird with the loveliest song sang, the forest would be a lonely place."
"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."
"In my deepest troubles, I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests."
"There is but one kind of love; God is love, and all his creatures derive theirs from his; only it is modified by the different degrees of intelligence in different beings and creatures."
Membership
In March 1827 John James Audubon was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1830 he was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1827
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
1830
Personality
Audubon has been called egotistic, but there was nothing so ponderous in his character; he had, rather, an almost womanish vanity, that extended to his handsome face, his clothes, at first elegant, then consciously rustic, and to the long backwoodsman ringlets which he would wear, no matter where he went.
Interests
Hunting, fishing, drawing, birds
Artists
Thomas Sully
Connections
In 1804, John met and became engaged to Lucy, daughter of William Bakewell. Later, in June 1808, Audubon married her. They had four children: Victor Gifford, John Woodhouse, Lucy and Rose.