For generations of children throughout North America, early impressions of the riches of that continent's native bird life have been dominated by the dramatic images created by the extraordinary 19th-century artist, naturalist and adventurer John James Audubon, who died 150 years ago this year. His most famous work, The Birds of America, one of the enduring achievements of US art as well as a pioneering glory of natural history published between 1827 and 1838, is a feast of almost surreal beauty and spectacle, breathtaking yet dignified and accurate. Audubon was many things, but he was not a sensationalist - at least not as an artist - and he studied his subjects in their natural environment, not in museum cases.
His name has also become synonymous with conservation. The National Audubon Society is a North American organisation founded in 1886 for the study and protection of birds. Admittedly, this may seem ironic, considering the vast number of birds Audubon (who loved to hunt) killed in the pursuit of art and sport. Still, in later life he did come to regret the killing. Thanks to his graceful Passenger Pigeon (1824), we have a beautiful record of this now extinct bird once also known as the wild pigeon, at one time more numerous than all other species of birds in the US combined. In Audubon's day, an estimated five billion of these birds inhabited Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio alone. The last one died in captivity in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914.
Many of the watercolours - such as Snowy Egret, American Bittern, Little Blue Heron, Common Snipe, Greater Flamingo and Peregrine Falcon; his dazzling depiction of the opportunistic trio, Blue Jays; as well as Whooping Crane, American Swallow-Tailed Kite and Bald Eagle (in the 1828 version) - have been reproduced so often and in so many contexts they are simply part of US life. Since 1937, when Macmillan publishers in New York reproduced the 435 Audubon prints in a smaller-than-original size from the Elephant Folio (1827-1838) and an additional 65 prints from the octavo, the artist has been assured of an audience even his brittle ego could never have envisaged.
Over a 20-year period, the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company of Milwaukee drew on Audubon's genius when reproducing his bird watercolours for its annual calendars. They were no ordinary calendars, but were of unusually high quality, and regarded as collector's items to be zealously guarded. Some 10 million prints were probably framed across the US, in time acquiring the status of family heirloom.
Audubon was an original and a stylist. He was also entirely self-taught, a fact he tended to conceal, inventing stories about training under Jacques-Louis David. He may have met the master, he certainly admired him and saw himself as his follower, adhering to David's teaching: always drawing what one sees and copying nature. But it is logistically impossible for him to have studied with him. It seems more likely the young Audubon may have briefly attended the local academy of drawing. He was a showman with a difficult personality tempered by a variety of insecurities, including his lack of scientific training. Even more troubling for him were the facts of his birth.
This most American of artists was born on April 26th, 1785, in Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to a Frenchman, Captain Jean Audubon, and his mistress, Jeanne Rabin, a young chambermaid. The infant was named Jean Rabin. However, when he was just over six months old, his mother died. On his third birthday, he was taken by his father to the home in Nantes he shared with his wealthy wife, Anne Moynet.
Just over a month short of his fourth birthday, he was formally adopted by his father and his wife, who seems a civilised woman and raised the boy and the daughter of another of her husband's affairs as her own. The child's name was then changed to Jean-Jacques Fougere. During this time, the prelude to the French Revolution, Captain Audubon, true to his entrepreneurial instincts and perhaps also looking to his son's future, purchased Mill Grove, a farm near Philadelphia. Audubon the artist, who became a US citizen in 1812, never appears to have forgotten what he referred to as the shame of his birth. Yet he was privileged. He was raised as a gentleman, could draw - concentrating on birds and flowers - and fenced.
At the age of 11, he began four years of naval training in Rochefort-sur-Mer. In the summer of 1803, he was 18. His father sent him to Mill Grove to learn English, or, more importantly, with the onset of the Napoleonic Wars, to avoid conscription. It was an important time. Internationally, the Louisiana Purchase, the biggest land sale in history, under which the US secured from France the entire Mississippi Valley up to the Rocky Mountains (an area of 828,000 square miles), was secured under President Jefferson. It doubled the size of the US and freed it from French influence. For the young Audubon, however, the year marked the beginning of his lifelong fascination with the birds of his new country - at a time when they were thriving at pre-environmental threat numbers. In the 1820s American birds enjoyed unfettered profusion. There were no endangered species.
Drawing was already his life and he bartered drawing lessons in exchange for tutoring in English. In 1805, aged 20, he returned to France for a year, during which he drew birds in pastel. He would later view this work as the beginning of his collection.
Having destroyed most of his earliest efforts, he began to keep his work from this point on. About 109 of these drawings and pastel watercolours, dated 1805-1812, and comprising the largest single collection, are owned by Harvard University.
By late May, 1806, Audubon had arrived in New York. Among his luggage were all of the drawings and pastels he had done in France. He presented them to his fiancΘe, Lucy Bakewell. Within months, he would begin experimenting with a technique he wanted to master, arranging newly killed birds in life-like poses with the use of wire. He also began to introduce watercolour into his work.
Audubon the artist was also intent on succeeding in business. He moved to Kentucky where his father had set him up in a general store. It was the first of several disasters, including bankruptcy. By then he had married Lucy, who would prove ever resourceful, raising their surviving two children, sons (both daughters died as babies), single-handedly. Meanwhile, her volatile, obsessive husband divided his time between his expeditions, painting his subjects and the more frustrating task of securing financial backing for his great project: The Birds of America.
It didn't take long for Audubon to realise he had no flair for merchant trading in flour, pork and lard, nor was he a natural real-estate speculator. The New Orleans-based business he began with his brother-in-law would not survive. But before the business collapsed, he would leave Kentucky and return to Pennsylvania, then resettle in Kentucky.
He was soon on the move again and often ended up giving art classes. One of his students in Ohio was extremely gifted. Joseph Mason was only 13 but, as Audubon wrote to Lucy, "he now draws flowers better than any man in America". The two only worked together for two years and Mason would later complain he never received due credit for the foliage and flowers he contributed to possibly up to 57 of Audubon's paintings. The artist's transient lifestyle makes for a complicated biography but it explains how he saw so much of his adopted country and its wildlife.
Apparently his personality was a handicap when it came to securing subscribers for his great project. In American Visions (1997), art critic Robert Hughes acknowledges Audubon as "a great formal artist" and praises The Birds of America as "a touchstone of American sensibility", noting "its sense of profile, placement, rhythm and graphic energy". He also makes it clear "he was not a nice guy".
Nice or not, Audubon was determined. Having been rejected by Philadelphia's scientific community, he travelled to London. The English loved the wild woodsman image cultivated by Audubon, whose flair for mythic self-invention finally paid off. Sporting long hair, slicked with bear grease, and a buckskin jacket, he played the part and won the exhibition space, patrons and membership of natural history societies he had sought back home. He also secured a fine engraver, the Havell family firm. By 1831, the then 46-year-old Audubon, who had all the while been also busy writing, was ready to see the first of five volumes of his Ornithological Biography (1831-1839) published. He also met a soulmate and fellow naturalist, the Rev John Bachman. His two daughters would each marry Audubon's widower sons.
Audubon's art had become the family business. His sons were also artists, though not as gifted as their father. However they would play an important part in completing his final work, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of America. This was the result of the artist's expedition to the West in 1843 as the frontier was being transformed. Then 58, Audubon no longer possessed the manic energy that had always sustained him but he survived the journey with some enthusiasm.
In less than three years, two of the three volumes of Quadrupeds had appeared. But his sight was failing. In 1847, he suffered a stroke and was in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease. The final volume of Quadrupeds was published the following year. John James Audubon died four months before his 66th birthday. Twelve years after his death, his destitute widow, Lucy, then supporting the families of both sons, who had also died, persuaded the New York Historical Society to buy the original paintings for a mere $4,000. The old lady lived on until 1874, and died in Kentucky aged 87. Life was cruel to her. Yet the artistic legacy of the obsessive, Faustian Audubon remains a testament to the grandeur, beauty and violence of nature.