John James Audubon
Artist and Naturalist
1785 - 1851
American Flamingo, c.1838


John James Audubon (1785-1851) was not
the first person to attempt to paint and
describe all the birds of America (Alexander
Wilson has that distinction), but for half a
century he was the young country’s dominant
wildlife artist.
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.




Another artist Alexander Wilson had
already published a set of bird prints;
American Ornithology* , but Audubon
thought he could do better, and he did.
Audubon’s pictures were more life-like
and also life size. He had them printed on
large sheets of paper 22"X 28". The
finished portfolio after it was leather
bound was about 26 1/2"X 39".
This portfolio of large prints was labeled a
"Double Elephant" portfolio. It was called
Birds of America.
The huge leather bound books originally
sold for $1,070 in 1826.

American Flamingo is one of the 435 handcolored engravings that make up John James
Audubon’s monumental Birds of America,
issued in four volumes between 1826 and
1838.

The massive publication includes life-size
representations of nearly five hundred
species of North American birds.


Although Audubon was not the first to attempt
such a comprehensive catalog,
His work departed from conventional
scientific illustration, which showed lifeless
specimens against a blank background, by
presenting the birds as they appeared in the
wild.




John James Audubon (1785-1851) was not
the first person to attempt to paint and
describe all the birds of America
Alexander Wilson has that distinction,
But for half a century he was the young
country’s dominant wildlife artist.
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.


Although Audubon had no role in the organization
that bears his name, there is a connection:
George Bird Grinnell, one of the founders of the
early Audubon Society in the late 1800s, was
tutored by Lucy Audubon, John James’s widow.

Knowing Audubon’s reputation, Grinnell chose his
name as the inspiration for the organization’s
earliest work to protect birds and their habitats.

Today, the name Audubon remains synonymous
with birds and bird conservation the world over.


When his pictures were first published, some
naturalists objected to Audubon’s use of
dramatic action and pictorial design,
But these are the qualities that set his work
apart and make it not only an invaluable
record of early American wildlife but an
unmatched work of American art.



Audubon was born in Saint Domingue (now
Haiti), the illegitimate son of a French sea
captain and plantation owner and his French
mistress.
Early on, he was raised by his stepmother,
Mrs. Audubon, in Nantes, France, and took a
lively interest in birds, nature, drawing, and
music.
In 1803, at the age of 18, he was sent to
America, in part to escape conscription into
the Emperor Napoleon’s army.





In the first decade of the nineteenth century he
immigrated to the United States to manage a farm
his family owned near Philadelphia.
He lived on the family-owned estate at Mill Grove,
near Philadelphia, where he hunted, studied and
drew birds,
He met his wife, Lucy Bakewell.
While there, he conducted the first known birdbanding 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.






He met a young woman named Lucy Bakewell.
They married and she was a constant source of
encouragement to him.
He said of her, "With her, was I not always rich?"
They would have four children. Their two
daughters died when they were babies, but their
two sons lived to adulthood.
The sons, Victor and John, would become artists
and help their father with the painting of the
backgrounds for his birds.
They were also active in the publication of his
works.

He lost the farm through neglect, distracted
by the overwhelming bounty and variety of
exotic birds he found in the region.



Audubon spent more than a decade in business,
eventually traveling down the Ohio River to western
Kentucky – then the frontier – and setting up a drygoods store in Henderson.
He 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.

When he was 35 years old he took an
eight month trip down the Mississippi
River to find and paint birds.



Audubon eventually set himself the heroic
task of locating, collecting, and depicting
every species of bird native to North America.
He moved his family briefly to New Orleans,
explored the environs of the Mississippi
River, a major flyway for migratory birds, and
eventually wandered farther from home to
comb the American frontier for unrecorded
species.



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, he lived a
rugged hand-to-mouth existence in the
South.
Lucy, a teacher and governess to wealthy
plantation families, was able to support
herself and their two sons while Audubon
pursued his dream of publishing a book
of drawings of birds.


Audubon went through many financial
hardships. If Lucy had not been such an
independent woman, he probably could
not have fulfilled his dream.
He gave art lessons to support himself,
and at one point even taught dancing
lessons to make a little money while he
looked for a publisher for his drawings.


Audubon’s procedure was to study and
sketch a bird in its natural habitat before
killing it carefully, using fine shot to minimize
damage.
His critical innovation was to then thread wire
through the specimen, allowing him to
fashion a lifelike pose.

He worked in watercolor, and had
completed some four hundred
paintings when he decided to
publish them as a folio of prints.



At one point early in his career he left 200 of his
bird drawings with a friend. When he returned
several months later he discovered that a pair of
rats had shredded his pictures to make a nest
and raised a family in the box.
It was such a tragic event in his life because he
had spent years making the drawings. The only
thing to do was start over.
This is what he did, even making improvements,
and within three years his bird portfolio was full
again.

Failing to find support in
Philadelphia, he sailed for
England, where he became
lionized as “The American
Woodsman.”
John James Audubon c. 1826





He was not experiencing success in
America selling his paintings, so he went
to England to sell subscriptions.
His clients had to subscribe to his
engravings which were delivered in
installments, five engravings at a time.
There would be one large picture of a bird,
one medium-size bird, and three small
birds.
The pictures were printed from copper
plates then watercolored by hand.
A subscription cost $1,000, which was a
lot of money in the 1800's.



In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished
collection to England. "The American
Woodsman" was literally an overnight
success.
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.

The engraving firm Robert Havell and Son
took on the challenge of reproducing
Audubon’s paintings on copper plates and
tinting the resulting black-and-white prints by
hand.


While in England he dressed as a
woodsman and let his hair grow long.
He worked long hours and painted in
public so people could watch him work.



To make Birds of America useful to both
professional and amateur ornithologists,
Audubon portrayed his subjects at eye level
so that
Their distinctive markings would be clearly
visible.
He also painted them as near as possible to
their actual size.


The images are huge, each about three feet
by two feet;
nevertheless, to make the larger specimens
fit the page, Audubon had to mold them into
unusual attitudes.

Because the American flamingo can stand up
to five feet high, Audubon was obliged to
depict that bird bending down, about to dip its
beak into the water.





His solution has other advantages since it allows us
to study not only the unmistakable plumage but
other distinguishing traits that might otherwise be
hidden from view:
long spindly legs that help the flamingo wade into
deep water,
webbed toes to support it on muddy ground,
A serpentine neck to twist the head backward in the
water, and
A boomerang-shaped beak to filter water and trap
food.

Flamingos are uncommonly social creatures,
so Audubon included other birds from the
flock in the background, standing tall in
shallow water;

Some appear in the more characteristic onelegged pose.

The distant view also affords a glimpse of the
flamingo’s habitat, the marshes and barren
mud flats not far from the coast.

Audubon’s eye for design lends another
dimension to his accurate draftsmanship.

The flamingo’s silhouette emphasizes the
elegant curve of its body, even as the abrupt
curve of its neck gives the shocking,
momentary impression of a headless bird.

The angle of the flamingo’s beak echoes the
edge of the rock on which it stands, just as
the sharp angle of its front leg echoes the
long, sinuous line of its neck.

Audubon plays up the flamingo’s trademark
shade of pink by setting the bird against a
background that appears, in comparison,
drained of color.

Like other American artists who sought to
record the unspoiled wilderness, Audubon
recognized that much of the wildlife he
portrayed was bound to vanish as
civilization pushed westward.


He himself had first encountered a flock of
American flamingos in May 1832, while
sailing from the Florida Keys.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the
birds had retreated to the southernmost point
of Florida, and today can be seen in North
America only in captivity.


The last print was issued in 1838, by which
time Audubon had achieved fame and a
modest degree of comfort, traveled this
country several more times in search of birds,
and settled in New York City.
He made one more trip out West in 1843, the
basis for his final work of mammals, the
Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America,
which was largely completed by his sons and
the text of which was written by his long-time
friend, the Lutheran pastor John Bachman
(whose daughters married Audubon’s sons).



John James Audubon's last major
accomplishment was the creation of 150
drawings of North American animals.
Having depicted all the known birds of North
America, but still lured by his love of nature
and art, he embarked on a final drawing
expedition up the Missouri River in the
summer of 1843.
With the aid of his son, John Woodhouse
Audubon, he created the first attempt ever to
document and depict all the mammals of
North America.


Produced from 1845 through 1848 by the
distinguished Philadelphia printmaker, J.T.
Bowen, the black and white lithographs were
completely hand colored.
Lithography proved an excellent medium for
depicting the tactile realism of the mammals'
fur.
Lynx
American Cross Fox
Oregon Flying Squirrel
Columbian Black Tailed Deer
Ocelot or Leopard Cat

Audubon during this period suffered a
stroke, and he was also in the early stage
of Alzheimer's disease. He died four
months before his 66th birthday.

He is buried in the Trinity Cemetery at 155th
Street and Broadway in New York City.

Lucy lived another twelve years and tried her
best to support the families of their sons who
had also died.

After her husband's death she started a school
and one of her students, George Bird Grinnell
loved birds just as Audubon had.

George Grinnell later started the Audubon
Society.
The Audubon Society


Knowing Audubon’s reputation, Grinnell
chose his name as the inspiration for the
organization’s earliest work to protect birds
and their habitats.
Today, the name Audubon remains
synonymous with birds and bird conservation
the world over.
 Lucy
sold his original
paintings for only $4,000
 She
died at the age of 87.
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.

Franklinia alatamaha, 1833
White Gerfalcons
Eastern Bluebird
Great Blue Heron
Ruffed Grouse
Great White Heron
Golden Eagle
Carolina parakeets
PILEATED WOODPECKER
Swallows
Trumpeter Swan
Bobwhite, Virginia Partridge