John James Audubon: The Making of an American (review)

Born in Haiti as the bastard son of a Frenchman, James Audubon grew up in France and moved to America, near Philadelphia, where as a young man he took up the unusual hobby of systematically drawing birds in dramatic poses. He married the practical, energetic Lucy Bakewell, and together they moved around the settlements of Kentucky and elsewhere trying to establish themselves as merchants. The American frontier of the early nineteenth century was an amazing and in some ways frustrating wilderness that was rapidly disappearing. In Louisville, they set up a store and with the depression of 1819 quickly went broke. Through the following few years, Lucy fell back on teaching and James on portrait painting to make a living.

By 1820, Audubon had settled upon the idea of doing a complete American ornithological collection. His technique required killing and sometimes wiring the birds into positions, which despite his skill was anything but simple. He left his wife and three young boys at home and with only a few dollars in his pocket began a life of travel, first on expeditions in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Between St. Louis and Natchez, he stayed for a while near New Madrid, Missouri, where a few poor, desperate people still lived despite the previous year's massive earthquake. The region of the lower Mississippi was a scarcely mapped and little-populated mystery in 1820. As he traveled, Audubon perfected his techniques of mixing chalks with watercolors to convey the delicate softness and detail of birds. In New Orleans, a town that he disliked despite the French connection, he added to his bird collection while painting portraits to get by.

Through their years of separation, Audubon continued to write detailed, often entertaining letters to his wife. They express many moods as well, including at times sadness, depression and anger at her for the infrequency of her letters back to him. They also express the remarkable details of a life on the move, driven by his seemingly unlikely ambition to create a representative selection of American birds.

The difference came when Audubon traveled to Britain, where the Industrial Revolution was well under way, economic wealth more widespread and an interest in both art and birds more common. From almost the day of his arrival in Britain, Audubon's reputation rose. To fund the massive expense of the engravings, he traveled widely, making contacts and friends, taking subscribers and in Edinburgh and later London finding printers to take on the sophisticated task of replicating his drawings with copperplate engravings and colorists. For him and for other American artists of the nineteenth century, England was a better place to get his art reproduced and also to finance it. Back in North America, now in his forties, he would continue working in Florida and Labrador to finish the collection.

Given all that he faced down in his career, Audubon's eventual success is a triumph of courage, salesmanship, hard work and luck. Because of the huge expense and difficulty of printing his collections, Audubon's management of the whole project was as remarkable as his art. There is no better example of the fact that for artists, practicality and hard work are as important as talent.