Audubon, John James

Audubon, John James

(b. Les Cayes, Santo Domingo [now Haiti], 26 April 1785; d. New York, N.Y., 27 January 1851)

ornithology.

Audubon’s father was Jean Audubon, a French sea captain and planter of moderate substance in Santo Domingo; his mother was a Mlle. Jeanne(?) Rabin(e?), who died soon after his birth. In 1791, he and a half sister were sent to Nantes, where their father had already arrived, to join him and Mme. Audubon (Anne Moynet), who graciously accepted the children of her husband’s island sojourn. They were formally adopted in 1794, the boy as Jean Jacques Fougére Audubon.

Audubon’s youth at Nantes and Coūeron, where he received a minimal elementary education, was comfortable and unexceptional. In 1803 he was sent to a farm, owned by his father, in eastern Pennsylvania and entrusted to the care of good friends. There his boyhood interest in birds—especially in drawing them—was intensified. In 1808 he married Lucy Bakewell, daughter of a prosperous neighbor, and moved to the new settlement of Louisville, Kentucky, where Audubon was to share in running a store.

Audubon had no formal training in natural history, having had only a brief acquaintance (upon revisiting France in 1805) with the obscure naturalist Charles d’Orbigny and a period in New York as a taxidermist under the many-faceted Samuel L. Mitchell (later founder of the Lyceum of Natural History). As an artist he was equally untutored (a persistent legend that he had briefly studied under Jacques Louis David seems to lack foundation). Marginally literate, Audubon had only hunting skill, undisciplined curiosity, great latent artistic power, and unfailing energy. He worked hard on his bird drawings, however, and developed a useful method of mounting dead birds on wires as an aid to delineation—a technique invaluable in a day without binoculars or cameras.

Between 1808 and 1819 Audubon failed as merchant and miller in both Louisville and Henderson, Kentucky, but in these formative years he ranged widely, from Pittsburgh as far west as Ste. Genevieve (now in Missouri). The country, if not untouched, was mostly unspoiled wilderness teeming with birds as little known to science as to him. He hunted and drew, sporadically at first, innocent of such patchy and uncertain knowledge as the few extant, relevant books would have given him. In common with not a few better-educated naturalists of the time, Audubon lacked formal method. He merely sought birds new to him, and shot and painted them, sometimes repeatedly, often substituting improved efforts for old.

Audubon briefly met the distinguished ornithologist Alexander Wilson at Louisville in 1810, and saw the first two (of nine) volumes of the artist–author’s pioneer American Ornithology (he later implied, perhaps correctly, that his own drawings were, even at that time, better than Wilson’s). Perhaps the idea of publication first entered his mind on this occasion, yet not until 1820, after going bankrupt, did Audubon set out by flatboat for Louisiana, with the single goal of enriching his portfolio of bird pictures. He would support himself precariously as itinerant artist and tutor, leaving much of the burden of supporting herself and their two sons to Lucy.

For the first time Audubon began a regular journal, some of which is extant. The journal of 1820 (the original of which survives) is a disorderly, semiliterate document. Like all the rest—the later ones are more articulate—it combines daily events, impressions of people and countryside, and random notes on birds encountered. These journals are valuable to ornithologists as checks on the formal texts that followed. Often more informative than the latter, they are nevertheless marked by lack of detail, imprecision, and not infrequent discrepancies. Audubon never kept a full, orderly record of his observations on birds, and in formal writing he obviously relied as often on memory as on the sketchy notes he kept.

In 1821–1824, chiefly in Louisiana and Mississippi, Audubon came into his full powers as a gifted painter of birds and master of design. There would be many more pictures, but he would never improve upon the best of those years. Neither, although he would acquire a modicum of worldliness and a veneer of zoological sophistication, would his working methods and descriptive skills be basically changed. Whatever Audubon in essence was to be, he was by 1824.

In that year Audubon sought publication of his work in Philadelphia and New York. This failing, he traveled to England in 1826. There, finding support, subscribers, and skilled engravers, he brought out the 435 huge, aquatint copperplates of The Birds of America, in many parts, over the next twelve years.

The dramatic impact of his ambitious, complex pictures and a romantic image as “the American woodsman” secured Audubon entry into a scientific community much preoccupied with little-known lands. He met the leaders of society and science and was elected to the leading organizations, including the Royal Society of London. Among his friends were the gifted ornithologist William Swainson, from whom he learned some niceties of technical ornithology, and the orderly, brilliant Scottish naturalistanatomist William MacGillivray. The text for Audubon’s pictures, separately produced at Edinburgh, emerged as the five-volume Ornithological Biography. MacGillivray edited this for grammatical form, and he also contributed extensive anatomical descriptions to the later volumes.

Audubon’s remaining efforts were devoted to the hopeless task of including all the birds of North America in his work. To this end he made increasing efforts to obtain notes and specimens from others and to cull the growing literature. Thus, much more than the early ones, the last volumes of his work have an element of compilation. He returned several times from his publishing labors in Scotland and England for more fieldwork, visiting the Middle Atlantic states in 1829, the Southeast as far as the Florida keys in 1831–1832, part of Labrador in 1833, and as far southwest as Galveston, Texas, in 1837. After his final return to the United States in 1839, Audubon journeyed up the Missouri River to Fort Union (the site of which is now in North Dakota) in 1843, obtaining birds treated in a supplement to the small American edition of his Birds, as well as some of the mammals discussed in his Viviparous Quadrupeds, which he wrote with John Bachman. In this, his last major effort, he was considerably assisted by his sons Victor and John.

Much, if not most, of Audubon’s singularly enduring fame, which tends to cloud scientific and popular thought alike, rests on his much-debated but obviously significant efforts as an artist. (The relevancy of his established artistic stature to his scientific contribution is critical and difficult to assess, but can scarcely be ignored.) The illustration of new and little-known animals, as part of their zoological descriptions, was a characteristic and important part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural history. Certainly Audubon kindled wide and enduring interest in this aspect of zoology—more, indeed, than would have been necessary for the strictly scientific appreciation of the subjects; his birds were portrayed with a flair, a concern for the living, acting animal in a suggested environment that was undreamed of before, and with a vigorous sense of drama, color, and design rarely equaled since. He had few significant predecessors and no debts in this area (only Thomas Bewick had earlier drawn—in simple woodcuts—birds as authentic). That Audubon’s pictures contained innumerable technical errors seems to be comprehended only by specialists. The facial expressions and bodily attitudes of his birds are often strikingly human, rather than avian, but this is natural enough, considering his emotional nature and lack of optical equipment; paradoxically, this kind of error may have much to do with his enduring popularity with the general public.

Other than his art—aside from the inevitable accumulation of general knowledge of the kinds, habits, and distribution of birds—Audubon produced little that was new. Even the grand scale of his work had been anticipated by Mark Catesby a century earlier and by Francois Levaillant a generation earlier. Essentially, he built on Wilson’s descriptive-anecdotal model (name the bird; say something general of its ways, habits, and haunts; and flesh out the account with a story or two of encounters with it in nature), as he states in the introduction to Volume V of the Biography. He went beyond Wilson in scope because he lived longer and had greater vigor; in point-for-point comparison, he tends to come off second best—where Wilson is dry and factual, even acerbic (but not artless), Audubon is grandiose, often irrelevant, romantic at best and florid at worst. His work, nevertheless, was the most informative available to American ornithologists between that of Alexander Wilson (as supplemented 1825–1833 by C. L. Bonaparte) and the beginning of Spencer Fullerton Baird’s vast influence around 1860. He influenced such American successors as Baird, Elliott Coues, and Robert Ridgway, however, more by kindling interest than by procedural example.

Although he possessed a good eye for specific differences and inevitably discovered a number of new forms, Audubon was not basically a systematist; the classification of his Synopsis (1839), which ordered the randomly discussed birds of the Biography, is routine. As a theoretician he fared little better, being distinctly inferior to Gilbert White, who wrote half a century earlier and without pretension (see Audubon’s curiously labored and undistinguished discussion of why birds do not need to migrate, in Biography, V, 442–445).

That Audubon possessed an original mind is shown, however, by a penchant (unfortunately little exploited) for experiment. As a young man in Pennsylvania he marked some phoebes with colored thread and recovered individuals after a year, thus anticipating bird banding by more than half a century. With Bachman in 1832, he conducted experiments designed to test the ability of the turkey vulture to locate its food by smell. The ingenious experiments lacked adequate controls and produced erroneous (though long credited) results.

In assessing Audubon, whose firm grip on the popular imagination has scarcely lessened since 1826, we must as historians of science seriously ask who would remember him if he had not been an artist of great imagination and flair. Not only does Audubon’s artistic stature seem to dwarf his scientific stature, but the latter would probably be still less had he not been a painter expected to provide text for his paintings. The chances seem to be very good that had he not been an artist, he would be an unlikely candidate for a dictionary of scientific biography, if remembered to science at all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Nearly all the paintings for The Birds of America are at the New-York Historical Society, and have been reproduced by modern methods in The Original Water-color Paintings by John James Audubon for The Birds of America (New York, 1966). Miscellaneous additional paintings are cited by biographers listed below.

Audubon’s books are The Birds of America, 435 aquatint copperplate engravings, 4 vols. without text (Edinburgh-London, 1827–1838); Ornithological Biography, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1831–1839); Synopsis of the Birds of North America (Edinburgh, 1839); The Birds of America, 7 vols. (New York-Philadelphia, 1840–1844), which combines the text of Ornithological Biography with inferior, much reduced, and sometimes altered copies of the plates of the 1st ed. of The Birds of America; and Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, 3 vols. plates (New York, 1845–1848) and 3 vols. text (New York, 1846–1854), subsequent eds. (to at least 1865) combine text and reduced plates (plates by J. J. and J. W. Audubon; text by J. J. Audubon and John Bachman).

Audubon’s comparatively few short articles in periodical literature are cited by biographers listed below.

The Life and Adventures of John James Audubon, written by Charles Coffin Adams from materials provided by Mrs. Audubon, Robert Buchanan, ed. (London, 1868), and its variant text, The Life of John James Audubon, Lucy Audubon, ed. (New York, 1869), contain the sole (but doubtless considerably modified) surviving record of Audubon’s trip to Ste. Genevieve in 1810–1811 (pp. 25–33 in the 1868 version; 1869 version not seen) and other matter; Maria R. Audubon’s Audubon and His Journals, E. Coues, ed. (New York, 1897), presents the only surviving version of the Labrador, Missouri River, and European journals. There is also a painstaking transcript of the extant Journal of John James Audubon Made During His Trip to New Orleans in 1820–21 (Boston, 1929).

II. Secondary Literature. The biographies cited below all contain extensive bibliographies that collectively provide detailed collations of Audubon’s major works, elucidate the complexities of later editions and imprints, and give access to all but the most recent literature on the subject.

Lesser biographies and much miscellany are cited in F. H. Herrick’s Audubon the Naturalist, 2nd ed., rev. (New York, 1938), still the basic and most extensive source but now outdated in some particulars by Ford; in S. C. Arthur’s Audubon, an Intimate Life of the American Woodsman (New Orleans, 1937), which includes some sources not cited elsewhere; and in A. Ford’s John James Audubon (Norman, Okla., 1964), which contains extensive new information on his parentage and early life in France. The popular John James Audubon by A. B. Adams (New York, 1966) contains some new sources and insights.

Searching appraisal of Audubon as an ornithologist may be found in the historical introduction to A. Newton’s A Dictionary of Birds (London, 1896), p. 24; in E. Stresemann’s preeminent Die Entwicklung der Ornithologie (Berlin, 1951), pp. 407–409; and in W. E. C. Todd’s exhaustive Birds of the Labrador Peninsula (Toronto–Pittsburgh, 1963), pp. 731–732, 742, a detailed evaluation of his work in Labrador. An extensive critique of Audubon as a bird painter is given in R. M. Mengel’s “How Good Are Audubon’s Bird Pictures in the Light of Modern Ornithology?,” in Scientific American, 216 , no. 5 (1967), 155–159.

Robert M. Mengel