John James Audubon

(1785-1851)   Ornithologist, naturalist, woodsman, drawer, painter

Name: John James (Jean Jacques) Audubon
Born: April 26, 1785 in Haiti
Nationality: French, but became U.S. citizen on July 3, 1812
Family: wife Lucy, 2 sons Victor Gifford and John Woodhouse, and a daughter Lucy who died at age 2.
Ocupation: music and fencing instructor, portrait painter, taxidermist, merchant, wildlife painter
Art Medium: watercolor
Publications: Birds of America (1839); The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1848)

Background: John James Audubon was born on April 26, 1785 in the French Colony of Santo Domingo (now Haiti). His father was Captain Jean Audubon, a French sailor, and his mother was his mistress, Jeanne Rabine. She died when Audubon was 6 months old. When Audubon was three, his father moved him to Nantes, a city on the Loire River in France. Here Audubon learned to love nature and wildlife and began to draw.

In 1803, the 18 year old Audubon moved to America to escape joining Napolean’s Army. His father wanted him to oversee a farm he owned in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. With few responsibilities at Mill Grove, Audubon’s life was carefree. “Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music,” he wrote, “occupied my every moment,” as did swimming and the local social life. “Not a ball, a skating match, a house or a riding party took place without me,” he recalled. Audubon quickly fell in love with the eastern Pennsylvania countryside and its animals, often roaming the woods and fields incongruously wearing satin breeches and silk stockings. He became an enthusiastic and skilled hunter, both for sport and for his art. He collected all kinds of wildlife specimens, which he both preserved and sketched in attic rooms at Mill Grove.

In a little cave on the banks of the Perkiomen Creek, Audubon conducted the first bird banding in America. Tying silver threads to the legs of phoebes, he discovered that they returned during the spring migration. He also developed techniques for passing wires through freshly killed birds to fix them in characteristic poses on which he based his life-like sketches. He wrote that he had “shot the first Kingfisher I met,” wired the body so that “there stood before me the real Kingfisher,” and proceeded to execute “what I shall call my first drawing actually from nature.” This innovative wiring process, on which he relied throughout his career, enabled Audubon to depict birds in animated and realistic postures, in contrast to the stiff and static images of his predecessors, who drew upon stuffed specimens.

At the age of twenty (1805), Audubon sojourned for a year with his family in France, where he rendered birds in pastel. He also gained his father’s approval to marry Lucy Bakewell, who lived nearby to Mill Grove. After their marriage in 1808, Lucy Bakewell Audubon supported her husband in times of trouble, remained at home to raise their two sons, Victor and John Woodhouse, and worked as a teacher.

“Immediately upon my landing” in the United States in 1806, he later wrote, “prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country,” Audubon resolved to devote his spare time to drawing each American bird in “its natural size and colouring.” Meanwhile, discouraged by disputes with partners and the failure of the lead mine on the property, Audubon sold Mill Grove and moved to Kentucky to seek his fortune as a frontier merchant. He was joined by his wife not long afterward.

Audubon found the wonders of Kentucky so compelling that he often neglected his store. After several commercial ventures failed– partly because he roamed the woods making sketches– he faced bankruptcy in 1819. For a time he eked out a living as an itinerant portrait painter and worked briefly as a taxidermist in Cincinnati, Ohio. But at the age of thirty-five, John James Audubon decided to turn passion into profession, audaciously setting out to depict every bird in America, with an eye to publishing the results. It was a remarkable undertaking for a newcomer with no formal art training, untutored in science, struggling with an unfamiliar language, having few friends, being husband and father, and possessing little money. Only a man of prodigious energy, ambition, determination, and patience, augmented with a knowledge of nature and artistic genius, could have matched his achievements.

Launching his full-time pursuit of America’s birds in 1820, Audubon wanted knowledge of his subjects in their habitats. For two decades, he travled to all parts of the country studying habitats and birds. It is about this time that Audubon develops the styles and techniques in his work that will be his signature. Naturalistic composition and enhanced watercolor application using different media to express textures become his trademark. Believing he had made sufficient progress on his project, Audubon in 1824 took his portfolio to Philadelphia, then the nation’s intellectual, scientific, and publishing center, to seek not only financial support, but an engraver to copy his drawings and a publisher. Posturing as the penultimate “American Woodsman,” Audubon dressed in buckskins and slicked his shoulder-length hair with bear grease and vigorously set out to promote his bird book. He was rejected in Philadelphia but kept searching for promoters. In 1839, at the age of fifty-nine, Audubon had achieved a most extraordinary feat. There were 435 plates, each one printed on double elephant folio paper and each bird depicted both life-size and in its natural environment. His Birds of America was finally released. The Audubon family settle in New York City but he is not content. Audubon decides to start another project, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America and sets out to paint mammals. In 1846, Audubon at age 60, starts to lose his eyesight. A year later he has a stroke, which disabled him, so he settles down in his New York home. In 1848, his The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America is completed. Audubon died at the age of sixty-six on January 27, 1851.

Audubon is remembered as a talented painter and avid bird-watcher. He loved nature and wildlife, and that can be seen through his paintings. He also loved the American country and wilderness and is one of the few painters that set out to paint only American animals. His artwork should be cherished, especially paintings of the “Carolina Parrot” and the “Passenger Pigeon” as these birds are now extinct and one of the only memories we now have of them are Audubon’s paintings.

→ For more info on his life
→ View his Birds of America.
→ View his Quadrupeds of North America.

Nature/Animal Quotes

“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” — Aristotle

“Nature does nothing uselessly.” — Aristotle

“All men by nature desire knowledge.” — Aristotle

“The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.” — Zeno

“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.” — E. B. White

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

“I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.”
– Charles Lindbergh

“I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.” — Joseph Addison

“Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.”
– George Eliot

“If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.” — Chief Seattle of the Suwamish Tribe, letter to President Franklin Pierce

“To insult someone we call him “bestial.” For deliberate cruelty and nature, “human” might be the greater insult.” — Isaac Asimov

“Don’t think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.” — Malayan proverb

“The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.” — Jane Goodall

“The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.” — Mark Twain

“Protect these harmless gentle cousins…” — Sir Arthur C. Clarke, on Gorillas

“Mountain gorillas are almost the closest relatives we have, and they will die if we don’t help them.” — Douglas Adams

“Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.” — Charles Darwin

“The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many”. — Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” -– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)

“Though human ingenuity in various inventions uses different instruments for the same end, it will never discover an invention more beautiful, easier, or more economical than nature’s, because in her inventions nothing is wanting and nothing is superfluous.” — Leonardo da Vinci

“First I shall do some experiments before I proceed farther, because my intention is to cite experience first and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way.  And this is the true rule by which those who speculate about the effects of nature must proceed.” — Leonardo da Vinci

Darwin Day

Today is Darwin Day! Charles Darwin was born today in 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. I’m not sure what one is supposed to do on Darwin Day, but you could always read Origin of Species or The Descent of Man or The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Good reading. Or think about evolution. The possibilities are endless!