This Strange Wilderness: The Life and Art of John James Audubon

by Nancy Plain

  Lucy still had to support the family. She worked as a governess in New Orleans, then found a teaching job—and a home for her sons—at Beech Woods, another plantation in Feliciana. Jane Percy, an outspoken widow, was its owner. There Lucy set up a little school, which attracted children from the surrounding countryside, and she was soon beloved in the community. Her husband, however, was looked on by some as an eccentric, even a “madman.”11 “My wife and family alone gave me encouragement,” wrote John.12

  26. Black-billed Cuckoo. The cuckoos are hard to spot among the magnolias.

  Even after Lucy had come to Louisiana, Audubon and Mason continued as itinerant artists. One of the best pictures from their travels is the Black-billed Cuckoo—bird by Audubon, flowers and leaves by Mason. By 1822 Joseph had been traveling with Audubon for two years and had painted about fifty backgrounds for his teacher. His father had died while he was away, and he now decided that it was time to go home. So ended one of America’s finest art collaborations, although when Audubon published his work, he would give Mason no credit.

  Jane Percy hired Audubon to paint a portrait of her daughters, but it seemed that fighting with his employers was becoming a habit. When Mrs. Percy complained that he had made her daughters’ skin look too yellow, it was Audubon’s turn to fly into a rage. How dare anyone criticize him, of all people, on color! He was immediately kicked off the property.

  But he had painted one masterpiece after another in Louisiana, and he believed that it was time to find a publisher. In 1824 he set out to try his luck in Philadelphia, the nation’s center of art, science, and learning. Somewhere on the journey north, he wrote to his old business partner: “I am yet, my dear Rozier, on the wing and God only knows how long I may yet remain so.”13

  It was spring when he arrived. He soon found friends and admirers, including the famous portrait painter Thomas Sully and the ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte, nephew of the emperor Napoleon. But Alexander Wilson, who had died in 1813, was still recognized in Philadelphia as the greatest ornithologist, and when Audubon dared to criticize him, he made some powerful enemies. They mocked Audubon as the “trader naturalist,” called his work “ill-drawn.”14

  27. Northern Bobwhite and Red-shouldered Hawk. Audubon painted many scenes of birds fighting to survive.

  Audubon’s bitterest foe was a man named George Ord, Wilson’s biographer and editor. Ord prevented the newcomer from joining Philadelphia’s prestigious Academy of Natural Sciences. Worse, he made sure that Audubon could find no publisher in the city. Turned away by the men he called the “Philadelphia Sharks,” Audubon made a new plan.15 He would publish his work overseas, in England.

  It would take him and Lucy a year to save enough money for this next trip. Mrs. Percy had forgiven him, so he lived at Beech Woods, teaching drawing, French, fencing, and music. And even a dance called the cotillion:

  I placed all the gentlemen in a line reaching across the hall, thinking to give the young ladies time to compose themselves and get ready when called. How I toiled before I could get one graceful step or motion! I broke my bow and nearly my violin in my excitement and impatience! The gentlemen were soon fatigued. The ladies were next placed in the same order and made to walk the steps; then came the trial for both parties to proceed at the same time while I pushed one here and another there, and all the while singing to myself to assist in their movements. Many of the parents were delighted.

  After this first lesson was over I was requested to dance to my own music, which I did until the whole room came down in thunders of applause, in clapping hands and shouting. . . . I went to bed extremely fatigued.16

  Audubon would gladly have stayed in Happyland forever, but he had work to do—and The Birds of America to sell. On May 18, 1826, he sailed for Liverpool, England.

  6

  The Birds of America

  Two months at sea, and he had no idea when he would see his family again. When he wasn’t seasick, he wrote in his journal, addressing the entries to Lucy as if they were letters. He sketched the sailors on deck and the fish they caught—dolphins, barracudas, sharks. A whale as long as the ship spouted in the waves. And everyone on board watched the horizon for pirates, as attacks were common in those days. But there was still time to worry. Audubon had failed to find a publisher in Philadelphia; what if he failed again? Some days his anxiety took over completely. “I immediately feel chilled, and suddenly throw my body on my mattress . . . , scarce able to hold the tears from flowing.”1

  The ship docked in Liverpool on July 21. The city was smoky and crowded, buzzing with the industry created by its cotton trade with the United States. “My heart nearly failed me,” Audubon wrote.2 He would rather have been surrounded by a flock of birds than a flock of strangers in a foreign land. Lucy’s sister Ann was then living in Liverpool with her husband, Alexander Gordon. Audubon rushed to see his relatives, but they acted as if they hardly knew him. “Yet what have I done?” he wrote to Lucy. “Ah, that is no riddle, my friend, I have grown poor.”3

  He rented rooms at an inn, then walked out to present a letter of introduction from a New Orleans businessman to a family named Rathbone. The Rathbones were wealthy cotton merchants and art collectors at the center of Liverpool’s cultural life. They gathered around as Audubon, so nervous that he was “panting like the winged Pheasant,” untied the strings of his portfolio.4 One by one he held up his pictures. To his great relief, the Rathbones declared them “splendid” and promised to help him in any way they could.5 Sixty-five-year-old Mrs. William Rathbone Sr., whom Audubon called the Queen Bee, became the first person to subscribe to The Birds of America, and this was before the artist knew if the book would ever be produced.

  The Rathbone friendship was the magic key that opened the door to Audubon’s life in England. One introduction led to another, and only ten days after arriving in Liverpool, he held his first exhibition. It was a stunning success. Hundreds of people came to gaze at the wild things that belonged to America. There was the bald eagle, America’s national bird. The wild turkey, both male and female, with the mother bird leading her babies through the forest. The Baltimore oriole, whose nest dangled from a branch like a soft pouch. The great horned owl, with its tufted ears and bold stare. “Drawn from Nature by J. J. Audubon.” These birds were called “a vision of the New World.”6

  America was a new world then. Only twenty years before Audubon’s exhibit, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had been on their historic expedition through the American West. One of Lewis’s tasks on that trip had been to gather as many new species of plants and animals as he could find. Audubon’s century was a golden age for naturalists—people who study nature, mostly plants and animals—because there was so much to learn about what the wilderness held. Naturalists, whose field is called natural history, explored the world in search of the rare and the new, and they amassed collections of specimens to study and classify. Their research laid the foundation for the modern sciences of botany, zoology, and biology. The most famous naturalist of the 1800s was Charles Darwin, who would sail to the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s. Audubon was working in the same spirit of discovery. When he started his quest for America’s birds, only a small number of them had been pictured or even described.

  28. Great Horned Owl. In Ornithological Biography, Audubon tells how he almost died chasing one: “I suddenly found myself in quicksand up to my armpits, and . . . must have remained to perish, had not my boatmen come up and extricated me.”

  To the English, Audubon was as exotic as his birds. He slicked his hair back with bear grease and wore woodsmen’s clothes, like a character from The Last of the Mohicans. Visitors crowded his rooms, and the elite of Liverpool sent their carriages to bring him to formal dinners. In the gleam of candlelight and crystal, he entertained them all. He claimed to have camped out with Daniel Boone. He performed birdcalls and demonstrated the howl of a wolf. Hadn’t he ever been attacked by Indians or at least a grizzly bear? his listeners wondered. Well, no, h
e answered, with a smile. The only creatures that had ever bothered him in the woods were ticks and mosquitoes. The artist found that he had a talent for self-promotion, even though he complained in private of terrible shyness. When he was asked to meet Lord Stanley, an aristocrat who would later become prime minister, Audubon wrote, “all my hair . . . stood straight on end.”7

  In October, he traveled by stagecoach to Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. One of the first people he met there was a man named William Lizars. After looking at the first few watercolors, Lizars leaped out of his chair. “My God! I never saw anything like this before!”8

  No one had. Before Audubon, most ornithologists depicted birds in profile and static poses. Their goal was to identify a species and all its characteristics, not to make art. But Audubon had found a way to do both, blending scientific accuracy with color and motion and spirit. He was the first to draw birds going about their daily activities and as they really lived, in mated pairs or larger groups. He was the first to show each stage of life, from newly hatched to very old. He was one of the first to include a bird’s whole environment, whether a frog-filled swamp or the outskirts of a town. And he was the first ornithologist to draw all his subjects life-size. In the age before photography, this was the next best thing to being there. One man wrote after seeing Audubon’s collection, “A magic power transported us into the forests.”9

  29. John James Audubon. Victor and Johnny painted their father in his woodsman’s clothes.

  30. Wild Turkey. The mother and her poults.

  Audubon still hadn’t found a publisher, so he and Lizars decided to produce The Birds of America themselves. Lizars was a skilled craftsman called an engraver. In the 1820s, engraving was the process by which many copies of a picture could be made for use as a book illustration. First the engraver traced a drawing onto a copper plate. Then he used acid to cut the tracings deep enough into the plate to hold ink. After ink was applied, a clean sheet of paper was pressed against the plate in order to receive the impression of the drawing. The result would be a black-and-white print as similar to the original picture as possible. Then the print was ready to be colored by hand.

  Audubon and Lizars planned to publish The Birds of America in five installments, or “numbers,” a year. Each number would include five different species. Subscribers would pay in installments, too, for a total of a thousand dollars. Since Audubon wanted to engrave four hundred species in all, he had set himself an enormous task. Against friends’ advice, he insisted that like the drawings, the prints be made life-size. For this, Lizars would have to use special “double elephant” paper—at 29 ½ inches by 39 ½ inches, it was the largest size made. It would be big enough even for the whooping crane, America’s tallest bird, as long as the bird’s neck was shown curving downward toward the ground.

  31. Whooping Crane. This crane can grow to be five feet tall.

  While Lizars began the engravings, Audubon was caught up in a storm of work, often getting by on four hours of sleep. He had to prepare his drawings for the engraving process, redoing many with the aid of his memory, which, luckily, was almost flawless. He had to pay all the production costs and support himself at the same time, so he painted dozens of pictures to sell. These were mostly oil paintings, and his subjects were hunting scenes and animals, everything from an otter caught in a trap to a pair of fighting cats. Audubon gave drawing lessons and showed other ornithologists how to use the position board. And to establish himself as a naturalist, he wrote scientific papers and read them at scholarly meetings. For his achievements, royal societies and the finest academic institutions honored him with memberships—“I, merely a Woodsman!”10

  There was also the never-ending push to sign up subscribers, for without their money, The Birds of America would come to a halt. All that winter and at all hours, Audubon’s carriage rolled through Edinburgh’s snowy streets to exhibitions and meetings and dinners. “My head is like a Hornet’s Nest and my body wearied beyond calculations,” he admitted.11 One evening he was so distracted that he went out wearing his bedroom slippers. But he could not afford to stay home.

  “It is Mr. Audubon here, and Mr. Audubon there; I only hope they will not make a conceited fool of Mr. Audubon at last,” he wrote.12 In spite of all the attention, he missed his home. “How I wish I was in America’s dark woods, admiring God’s works in all their beautiful ways.”13 He wrote almost every day to Lucy. Most of the time, he begged her to come to England: “My Dearest Friend— . . . I cannot bear to be without thee.”14 But at other times, he told her to wait until he had saved enough money to support them both. Lucy, who was still teaching in Louisiana, had trouble making up her mind, too. As time passed, she felt more and more abandoned, and her own letter writing nearly stopped.

  When Lizars finished the first five prints, Audubon took them to London to rustle up subscribers. He hated England’s largest city. It was foggy, dirty, and crime ridden, and it seemed to him “like the mouth of an immense monster, guarded by millions of sharp-edged teeth.”15 He gave money to children begging in the streets and was horrified to hear that three men had been hanged for stealing sheep. “The contrast between the rich and the poor is a constant torment to me,” he wrote.16 Yet he bought himself a new suit—black “like a mournful Raven”—to dine with lords and ladies, famous artists, heads of museums and scientific societies.17 Distinguished people signed up for his book, including King George IV.

  Lizars wrote from Edinburgh to say that his colorists were on strike, and he advised Audubon to find a new engraver. After days of trudging up and down London streets, Audubon met a father-and-son team, Robert Havell Sr. and Robert Havell Jr. The older Havell was a colorist, the younger an engraver. They made a sample print of one of Audubon’s birds. When he saw it, he wanted to hug and kiss them but danced around the room instead. The Havells were even better at their work than Lizars. Faster and cheaper, too.

  Not everyone idolized the American artist. One aristocrat, the Earl of Kinnoul, called Audubon to his mansion to tell him that his pictures were a “swindle.”18 To the earl, all the birds looked alike. Audubon held his temper in front of “the rudest man I have met in this land.”19 But later, he wrote that the earl looked like a bird himself, “with a face like the caricature of an owl.”20 Then came news from Philadelphia that his old enemy, George Ord, was in a fury over scientific papers that Audubon had written. In one Audubon described experiments he had conducted that showed that vultures find their prey by sight, not scent. In another, he claimed that rattlesnakes could climb trees. “Lies,” fumed Ord, and he teamed up with an English naturalist named Charles Waterton to try to ruin Audubon’s reputation.21 But these men were “crazed Naturalists of the Closet,” countered Audubon.22 They stayed home and merely read about nature while he, Audubon, went out to see it for himself. In time Audubon’s findings on the vulture would be proven largely correct. His paper on the snake, although it contained other errors, was also right: rattlesnakes can climb trees.

  32. Bald Eagle, America’s national bird.

  “I do any thing for money now a days,” he told Lucy.23 In between his stays in the big cities of Scotland and England, he toured the smaller ones, looking for new subscribers and collecting money from old ones. In September 1828 he went to Paris—his first time back to France in twenty-two years. Both his parents were dead now, but his sister, Rose, was still living in Couëron. Audubon did not visit her. Instead he stayed in the city, enjoying French coffee, which he thought was the best in the world, and trying to sell his book. Although he did not sign up many new subscribers, he met with Baron Georges Cuvier, the most respected naturalist in France. Cuvier took one look at Audubon’s portfolio and called it “the greatest monument erected by art to nature.”24 Cuvier introduced Audubon to the duc d’Orléans, who would soon become King Louis-Philippe. D’Orléans subscribed to The Birds of America, and so did the current French king, Charles X.

  Back in London, Audubon concluded, “I have not worked in vain.
”25 He had won great praise in Europe. And his “Great Idea,” thanks to the Havells’ engravings, was on its way to becoming a reality. But by 1829 he had been away from America for three years. His marriage with Lucy was at the breaking point, and he had missed seeing his sons grow from boys to young men. He had more work to do in America, too, with more species to find. On April 1, having left the Havells with enough watercolors to keep them busy for a whole year, Audubon boarded the ship Columbus and headed for home. Out on the Atlantic, he thought about the twists and turns his life had taken—“Fortune if not blind certainly Must have his Lunatic Moments.”26 He had left America under a cloud of bankruptcy and failure. He was coming home a star.

  7

  Team Audubon

  Audubon did not rush to Louisiana to see Lucy. Now that The Birds of America was in production, he was in a race against time to collect as many species as he could. He had begged his wife to understand: “Thou knowest I must draw hard from Nature every day that I am in America.”1 Everything else, even family, would have to wait. If the 1820s were a storm of activity for him, the 1830s would be a hurricane. In a time when horseback, stagecoach, and steamboat were the main means of travel, he would cover an almost impossible amount of territory. Not only would he make three more trips back and forth across the Atlantic, but he would crisscross North America—east, south, north, and west.