John James Audubon
John James Audubon
1785 - 1851
In 1803 Audubon travelled to the USA to oversee Mill Grove, an estate owned by his father on the outskirts of Philadelphia, PA. Uninterested in practical affairs, he spent his time hunting and drawing birds. His drawings (many in Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Houghton Lib.) from this period are executed primarily in pencil and pastel. They are conventional specimen drawings that define individual birds in stiff profile with little or no background. A number of these works, however, bear notations from Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–47). Catesby’s etchings, which were some of the first natural history illustrations to stress the interaction between organisms and their habitats, clearly impressed Audubon, and soon his work began to address the complex relations that exist between birds and their environments. He also began to use watercolour, the medium he employed most regularly as a mature artist.
In 1807 Audubon moved to Louisville, KY, where his passion for the study and depiction of birds accounted, at least in part, for the failure of a series of business ventures. In 1810 he was visited by the Philadelphia naturalist–artist Alexander Wilson, who was looking for subscribers for his illustrated American Ornithology (1808–14). Audubon, who believed himself the better artist, did not subscribe, but Wilson’s work undoubtedly inspired him to begin his own large-scale publication on American birds.
Having been declared bankrupt in 1819, Audubon moved to Shippingsport, KY, where he began to draw portraits in chalk. The following year he briefly ran a drawing school in Cincinnati, OH, and also worked for the Western Museum at Cincinnati College (now the Museum of Natural History), where he stuffed animal specimens and drew landscape backgrounds for museum displays. It was during this time that he dedicated himself to the publication of his own watercolours of American birds. In October 1820, accompanied by his student, Joseph Mason (1807–83), Audubon left for a three-month collecting and drawing expedition down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. At the end of this trip, in 1821 he explored the Louisiana bayous in search of birds; he painted each new species, and Mason supplied detailed backgrounds for over 50 of the watercolours. In 1824 Audubon attempted to publish his pictures in Philadelphia, but he met with a disappointing reception from the scientific community there, due partly to his own arrogance and partly to the community’s loyalty to Wilson. For the next two years he continued to observe and paint the birds of the southern states.
In May 1826 Audubon left for England, where he exhibited his watercolours at the Liverpool Royal Institution to great acclaim. In order to increase his income, he sold a number of copies of his works in oil. He also exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists, London, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Institution of Edinburgh. In November 1826 Audubon entered into an agreement with the engraver William Home Lizars to publish his watercolours as handcoloured engravings. After several months, however, with only ten plates completed, the contract was terminated, and Audubon was compelled to find a new publisher. The engraver Robert Havell jr undertook the project, and by the autumn The Birds of America was under way.
While overseeing the production of the plates for The Birds of America, Audubon worked on his accompanying text, the Ornithological Biography (1831–8). He also commissioned Joseph Bartholomew Kidd (1808–89) to copy his watercolours in oil. From 1831 to 1833 Audubon received from Kidd at least 94 copies of watercolours for the first and second volumes of The Birds of America. These, however, were unsigned, and have consequently been difficult to distinguish from copies painted by Audubon himself, and by his sons Victor Gifford Audubon (1809–62) and John Woodhouse Audubon (1812–60), both accomplished artists.
Audubon returned to America to seek new subjects, in 1829–30 in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and in 1831 in the Florida Keys, accompanied by the artist George Lehman (d 1870). In Charleston, SC, he befriended the Rev. John Bachman (1790–1874), a naturalist whose sister, Maria Martin (d 1863), provided watercolours of plants and insects for the backgrounds of approximately 35 plates. Audubon continued his explorations in Labrador, Newfoundland, with his son John, returning to England in 1834.
The Birds of America was completed in early 1839 as a double elephant folio. Issued by subscription in 87 parts, the set contains 435 handcoloured prints of 1065 life-sized birds representing 489 species. Havell produced these prints by a complex process of engraving, etching and aquatint. The original watercolours for the set belong to the New-York Historical Society, New York. The watercolours and the prints reflect the growing interest of naturalists to define species not only according to anatomical traits but also according to characteristic behavioural patterns. Audubon’s works generally present several birds from the same species engaged in such typical group activities as hunting, feeding, courting or caring for their young . Foreshadowing Darwinism, many of Audubon’s most dramatic images openly challenge the traditional conception of a benevolent Creation by pitting predators against prey, and even showing members of the same species confronting one another in a violent struggle for survival.
Between 1840 and 1844 a seven-volume octavo version of The Birds of America was produced by the Philadelphia firm of J. T. Bowen. This publication, overseen by John Woodhouse Audubon, contains 500 lithographs of the original prints, as well as prints of several new birds. In 1842 Audubon settled on the Hudson River, at an estate called Minnie’s Land, and began work on The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (150 plates, 1845–8). His sons assisted, with John Woodhouse Audubon producing more than half the studies for the 150 handcoloured lithographs. Seeking new specimens for this publication, Audubon made his last extended expedition along the upper Missouri and Yellowstone rivers in 1843, accompanied by John Bachman and the young naturalist Isaac Sprague (1811–95). Bachman wrote all of the text which accompanied the plates for The Viviparous Quadrupeds in the volumes that appeared between 1846 and 1854. [Amy Meyers. "Audubon, John James." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T004944.]
Person TypeIndividual
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French, 1864 - 1901
