John James Audubon
 John
James Audubon was a French-American ornithologist, naturalist,
hunter, and painter. He painted, catalogued, and described the birds
of North America in a form far superior to what had gone before. In
his outsize personality and achievements, he seemed to represent the
new American nation of the United States. American artist and
ornithologist John James Audubon is mainly remembered for his
Birds of America series, a book of 435 images, portraits of
every bird then known in the United States, all painted and
reproduced in the size of life. Its creation cost Audubon
eighteen
years of monumental effort in finding the birds, making the book,
and selling it to subscribers. Audubon also wrote thousands of pages
about birds; he’d completed half of a collection of paintings of
mammals (The Viviparous Quadrapeds of North America) when
his eyesight failed in 1846.Audubon was not born in America, but saw
more of the North American continent than virtually anyone alive,
and even in his own time he came to exemplify America, the place of
wilderness and wild things. The history of his life reveals his era
and his nation. He was, in a sense, a one-man compendium of American
culture of his time. And his growing apprehension about the
destruction of nature became a prophecy of his nation’s convictions
in the century after his death. |
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 John James Audubon was born in 1785 in Les Cayes, Santo Domingo (now Haiti). on his father's sugar
plantation. He was the illegitimate son of Lieutenant Jean Audubon,
a French naval officer, and his mistress Jeanne Rabin, a
French/Spanish Creole from Louisiana. Audubon's mother died when the
boy was just a toddler, perhaps in illness related to the birth of
her daughter During the American Revolution, his father Jean Audubon
was imprisoned by the British. After his release, he helped the
American cause. At the age of four John Audubon was taken to France
and adopted by his father's legal wife, who raised John and his
half-sister as if they were her own.
From
his earliest days, Audubon had an affinity for birds. "I felt an
intimacy with them…bordering on frenzy must accompany my steps through
life." In 1803, Capt. Audubon sent his eighteen year old son to
Pennsylvania to manage the family's estate there, and to escape
Napoleon's draft. Audubon caught yellow fever upon arrival in New York
City. The ship's captain placed him in a boarding house run by Quaker
women. They nursed Audubon to recovery and taught him English, including
the Quaker form of using "thee" and "thou", otherwise then
anachronistic. He traveled with the family's Quaker lawyer to the
Audubon family farm Mill Grove, near Philadelphia. The 284-acre
homestead, bought with proceeds from the sale of his father's sugar
plantation, is located on the Perkiomen Creek, just a few miles from
Valley Forge. Audubon lived with the tenants in what he considered a
paradise. "Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every
moment; cares I knew not, and cared naught about them".
It was here that he met Lucy Bakewell,
who became his wife
in 1808. Her unwavering support, through difficult financial and
personal circumstances, proved critical to Audubon's ultimate success as
an artist and naturalist. |
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 While living in Mill Grove, John
James Audubon
conducted the first known bird-banding experiment in North America, tying
strings around the legs of Eastern Phoebes; he learned that the birds returned
to the very same nesting sites each year. Audubon spent more than a decade in business, eventually traveling down
the Ohio River to western Kentucky, then the frontier. He set up a
dry-goods store in Henderson. Audubon continued to draw birds as a hobby, amassing an
impressive portfolio. While in Kentucky, Lucy gave birth to two sons, Victor
Gifford and John Woodhouse, as well as a daughter who died in infancy. Audubon
was quite successful in business for a while, but hard times hit, and in 1819 he
was briefly jailed for bankruptcy. With no other prospects, Audubon set off on his epic quest to depict America's avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist's materials, and a young assistant. Floating down the Mississippi, Audubon lived a rugged hand-to-mouth existence in the South while Lucy earned money as a tutor to wealthy plantation families. In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished collection to England and began to attain his fame as an artist. His life-size, highly dramatic bird portraits, along with his embellished descriptions of wilderness life, hit just the right note at the height of the Continent's Romantic era. Audubon found a printer for the Birds of America, first in Edinburgh, then London, and later collaborated with the Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray on the Ornithological Biographies - life histories of each of the species in the work. |
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 John James Audubon devised an original set of experiments challenging the common belief that
vultures find their food by smelling it. He put a painting of a dead sheep into
an open field; sure enough, vultures landed and tugged at the canvas. He then
put the painted decoy down close to a concealed pile of stinking vulture “food”;
again, they pecked only at the painting - at the image rather than the scent of
food. Finally he put small pieces of beef onto a cloth that covered a large
amount of reeking offal. The vultures ate the beef, but did not detect the
covered food. Audubon had proved his point. John
James Audubon probably regarded his election to membership in the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, the Linnaean Society, and the Royal Society of London as his greatest
accomplishment as a scientist. To most people today his scientific success is
best exemplified by the birds. In 1841 Audubon bought an estate on the Hudson
River and settled down to advise and encourage young scientists.
It was during this period that the romantic picture of Audubon
as the "American Woodsman," the great lover of birds, began to
emerge. After several years of illness, Audubon suffered a
slight stroke in January 1851, followed by partial paralysis and
great pain. Audubon died on January 27, 1851. Audubon’s
story is one of triumph over adversity; his accomplishment is
destined for the ages. He encapsulates the spirit of young
America, when the wilderness was limitless and beguiling. He was
a person of legendary strength and endurance as well as a keen
observer of birds and nature. Like his peers, he was an avid
hunter, and he also had a deep appreciation and concern for
conservation; in his later writings he sounded the alarm about
destruction of birds and habitats. It is fitting that today we
carry his name and legacy into the future. |
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