Books: The Prodigal Painter

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON by Alice Ford. 488 pages. University of Oklahoma. $7.95.

The Frenchman who became the world’s most celebrated delineator of birds was himself a bird of paradox. His name, until he anglicized it, was Jean Jacques Audubon. His adopted home was the U.S. And his natural habitat, proclaimed in assuming an additional name, was “Laforest.” But a major part of his time was spent in courtrooms eluding creditors, in Europe’s royal courts soliciting patronage, and in scientific academies quarreling with competitors.

Alternately driven and dreaming, irresponsible and ingratiating, mean-spirited and maudlin, Audubon was inevitably misunderstood by contemporaries and, maintains Biographer Alice Ford, “errantly idealized” by her dozen-odd predecessors. As an antidote, Author Ford has presented, in rather stilted fashion, back-to-back facts that usefully clear away the web of fabrication that the Audubon family did their best to spin.

In-Port Wife. His granddaughters, romanticizing Audubon’s own embellished accounts, implied that he might have been France’s “lost Dauphin”—the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, whom she tried to smuggle out of France just before she died on the guillotine. John Audubon was, in fact, the bastard son of a Breton-born chambermaid, and was sired not at Versailles but in Haiti in 1785. The father was Jean Audubon, a captain of French merchantmen and men-of-war. Though he commanded a corvette in Count de Grasse’s fleet at the surrender of Yorktown in 1781, Jean Audubon was never, for all his son’s boasting, of flag rank or a staff officer in the so-called “Battle of Valley Forge.” He was also, despite land speculations in the Caribbean and Pennsylvania, ever at sea financially. When a native insurrection threatened his Haitian holdings in 1790, he brought young John and another lovechild (by a quadroon) back to his complaisant in-port wife in Nantes. She happily adopted both of them.

John flunked out of maritime training school, and was bundled off to Pennsylvania to try his hand at business. He proved even more inept than his father. His first investment was in a frontier store in Louisville. On a typical day in the firm’s short, unhappy life, Audubon’s horse strayed away with a saddlebag full of cash while the proprietor stalked an unfamiliar warbler into the canebrake. Subsequent business ventures in other states and territories also foundered, leaving Audubon briefly in debtor’s prison.

Peddler in Coonskins. The failures convinced Audubon, at 35, that his real vocation was as a painter and naturalist. He started on the 435 drawings that were to become his masterwork, The Birds of America. It was 18 years in the works, and in the meantime he supported himself as a sign painter, debutante’s tutor and dancing master. To help feed the two children, his wife Lucy taught school.

When he had completed most of his field work, he sailed to Europe, beginning a frustrating decade of exhibiting his works, painting potboilers for pin money, and overseeing the London engravers who were producing his folio. Most important, of course, was the peddling of it, and at that, Audubon proved to be about the most charming salesman since Benjamin Franklin. His “simplicity” drew the praise of both Sir Walter Scott and Actress Fanny Kemble, though the guard at the Louvre barred the door when Audubon tried to enter in coonskin cap. Baron de Rothschild “hitched his trousers” at the idea of paying $1,000 for the four volumes,* but came around after cogitation. France’s future King Louis Philippe signed up, saying, “This surpasses all I have seen.” So did King George IV.

As every ornithologist knows, Audubon was a far better painter than a naturalist. Honors were showered upon him by learned societies in nearly every civilized nation. To his credit, Audubon was not content to rest on his laurels.

At 58, he set off on a rigorous sketching foray to the Yellowstone River. By then toothless and unable to eat the buffalo his companions shot, he somehow fattened (by 24 Ibs.) on the trip. But once back home in Manhattan, Audubon wasted into senility and then death. His two artist sons, who collaborated on his last work, Quadrupeds of North America, squandered their proceeds like the Audubons they were. At 70, Lucy Audubon had no choice but to go back to schoolteaching.

* The 100 surviving sets would now fetch $50,000 apiece.