John James Audubon

1785-1851

French-American Naturalist and Artist

John James Audubon is famous for the brilliant artistry of his Birds of America and his Viviparous Quadrupeds of America, completed between 1827 and 1854. Audubon was the son of his father's Creole mistress, who died when he was seven months old. He was formally adopted by his father, a French naval officer, and his father's French wife, who educated him at home. He briefly attended Rochefort-Sur-Mer Naval Academy in 1796.

Audubon's earliest drawings date from the year 1805. His claims that he had studied with the French painter Jacques Louis David in 1802-03 are now regarded as invalid by modern biographers. He briefly visited the United States in 1803, and in 1806 began a business career in New York, Kentucky, Missouri, and Louisiana that ended in bankruptcy in 1819. He married Lucy Bakewell in 1808. They had two daughters (both of whom died in infancy) and two sons, Victor Gifford (b. 1809) and John Woodhouse (b. 1812), who later helped their father in his artistic work. Lucy Audubon was a teacher whose earnings provided much of the family's income for years.

Beginning in 1819-20, with a short-lived position as a taxidermist in Cincinnati, Audubon was an itinerant artist, clerk, and tutor. By 1820 he decided to devote full time to science and art. He planned a large scale set of paintings depicting all the known American birds in elephant folio size and began painting them. Between 1826 and 1839, he visited England four times, supervising engravings of his paintings while soliciting subscriptions from well-to-do individuals and institutions in Europe and the United States. The plates for his Birds of America were published in four volumes (1826-1838), followed by a summary and index volume, A Synopsis of the Birds of America (1839). The Ornithological Biography (published in five volumes between 1831 and 1839), designed as the accompanying text to his paintings, was combined with the pictures in a smaller octavo edition between 1840 and 1844. It was the most commercially successful of any natural history book published anywhere in the world to that time, and it was frequently reprinted. The income from this series provided Audubon's family with their first permanent home, in New York City, in 1842.

Audubon's last project was a study of American land mammals, the Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, with the paintings published in two volumes (1845-46). The three-volume text, by North Carolina minister and mammalogist John Bachman (1790-1874), appeared between 1846 and 1854. Text and pictures were combined in later editions. Audubon's eyesight began to fail in 1846, and by the next year he had become senile. His sons completed the paintings, and with Bachman's help brought the project to a conclusion. John Woodhouse Audubon was the more gifted animal artist, while Victor painted backgrounds and served as business manager for the family publishing activity. They were assisted by the Reverend Bachman's second wife, Maria, who completed many of the insect and flower backgrounds for both the Birds and the Quadrupeds. Today, it is difficult for experts to tell which mammals were painted by John Woodhouse and which were completed by his father. Both sons married daughters of the Reverend Bachman, but tragically, both brides died young. Victor and John both remarried but died not too long after their father, in 1860 and 1862, respectively.

After her sons died, Lucy Audubon resumed teaching to help support herself and her fifteen grandchildren. In 1863, short of income, she sold all but three of the original bird paintings done by her husband to the New York Historical Society for $4,000. Most of the copper plates used in printing the Elephant Folio engravings were melted down for the value of the metal; several dozen survive today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and other institutions. Audubon's fame rests on the lifelike appearance and the graceful artistry evident in the Birds of America and the Quadrupeds, which have been many times reprinted. Audubon, however, sometimes had to work rapidly, before his specimens decayed, and in some cases the birds and mammals were painted in somewhat stiff and unnatural poses. His work, however, has been very influential in familiarizing Americans with the fascinating variety of North American birds and mammals. Toward the end of his life, he expressed concern about the declining numbers of certain species, and he has become identified with the beginnings of America's conservation movement.

KEIR B. STERLING