Animals: Birds of America

Down the Ohio River floated a skiff manned by two Negroes, carrying a young couple and their baby to a new home farther west. The long-haired young man, whose weathered face belied his trade, was a storekeeper with a passion for painting birds. His name was John James Audubon. Passing an island, Audubon saw the cross-eyed, hook-nosed face of a horned owl. Up came his fowling piece; he shot, leaped overboard to retrieve the bird. As he waded through the shallows he began sinking in quicksand. The Negroes, cautioning him not to move, braced themselves with oars and driftwood, pulled him out. He lost the owl.

But he went on, through hazards of flood, hurricane, earthquake, blizzard, to find another horned owl, 1,000 more birds. All of them he painted patiently, carefully, some of them over & over, until he had 1,065 water colors with which he was satisfied. While Audubon looked for an English publisher for his work, he had considerable trouble proving his point that the birds should be reproduced, as he had painted them, life size. “If large,” one publisher wrote of the projected book, “only public institutions and a few noblemen will purchase it. If small, it may sell a thousand copies.”

The Birds of America was printed large 39½ in. by 26½ in.) at $1,000 a set, and hardly 200 sets were sold. Any well preserved complete set of that edition is now worth almost $15,000. When the “octavo” edition (10¼ in. by 7 in.) was brought out in 1840-44, including most of the “elephant” plates reduced, some new ones, and a considerable amount of written text, the predicted 1000 were subscribed for. This week the prediction was expanded to exploding point when 50,000 copies of the first “public” edition* were released. The new book consists of the plates from the two earlier editions and explanatory notes by William Vogt, editor of Bird Lore, the official publication of the National Association of Audubon Societies.

Audubon, hypercritical of his own work, would never have passed the present pictures, which have suffered from the reduction in size and difference in the method of reproduction. The “elephant” folio was exquisitely engraved on copper and aquatinted (principally by Robert Havell, who edited as he transcribed Audubon’s watercolors, here deleting a leaf-spray, there toning down a garish sunset sky,altogether contributing much artistic merit to the pictures). Plates for the new edition have been reduced and reproduced by mechanical, sometimes fuzzy lithography. Nevertheless, the pictures’ cumulative effect makes the book exciting. The wild turkey, giant among U. S. birds, struts proudly across Page 1; the duck hawk drools blood in a savage excess of appetite; a little mockingbird cries defiance into the gaping mouth of a rattlesnake; midget warblers perch in a currant bush; the white-bellied booby stares; a least bittern chants in a voice “like a mourning dove imitating a pied-billed grebe.”

“The American Woodsman.” Certain wistful biographers have hoped that John James Audubon was really the lost Dauphin, sneaked from Paris during the French Revolution. Audubon himself may have thought he was. A vain man, he affected popinjay dress against the dun background of Pennsylvania Quakers, crow’s raiment in dandiacal English society. At any rate, his origins were mysterious. He was, perhaps, born in Les Cayes, Santo Domingo (now Haiti) in 1785. Little is known of him before he was 9, when he was legally adopted in France by one Captain Audubon, who said he was the child’s father. Variously called Fougere (“Fern”), La Foret, and plain Jean Jacques, the pampered child learned stalking tricks near his Nantes home. After brief study of painting under Classicist David, he was sent to America, where he devoted himself to sketching wild life, playfully at first, later so earnestly that he spent many years in almost incredible explorations—fromPennsylvania’s Perkiomen River, under whose ice he was drawn one winter night; up the Hudson’s shore, west to the Ohio’s falls, through Kentucky meadows (where Daniel Boone taught him how to “bark” squirrels), down a flooded Mississippi into Louisiana bayous; along Florida’s keys. Always poor, Audubon let his loyal wife support him, while he followed his lifelong, single purpose: to paint the birds of the U. S. in their natural habitat.

The fruits of Audubon’s hard work were bitterly attacked by contemporaries—by art critics like William Dunlap, by jealous naturalists like Alexander Wilson. Neither artists nor scientists liked or trusted his unseemly wedding of science with art; both avowed the result was properly neither. Audubon, who thought of himself as first a backwoodsman, then an artist, did not live to hear their paltry jibes drowned in the ringing praise a nation so often belatedly bestows on its foremost citizens.

*Macmillan ($12.50).