When an 18-year-old Frenchman named Jean-Jacques Audubon disembarked in New York in 1803, the landscape that stretched away to the west must have struck him as huge in every way. From the Appalachians to the Mississippi Valley stretched a forest of immense trees. In the bottomlands, the sycamores and tulip trees grew large enough that pioneer families could live in their hollowed boles. Beyond the forest lay the seemingly endless prairie with its brown tides of bison. Sturgeon eight feet long swam in the rivers. Passenger pigeons alit in immense swarms, one pioneer noted, roosting in the high trees “in the same manner as bees in swarms cover a bush, being piled on the other, from the lowest to the top-most boughs, which so laden, are seen continually bending and falling with their crashing weight.” Green, yellow, and red Carolina parakeets–now, like the pigeons, extinct–settled on fields, covering them so entirely, Audubon wrote, “that they present to the eye the same effect as if a brilliantly colored carpet had been thrown over them.”
There was something heroic about Audubon’s life, matching the landscape he inhabited. The illegitimate son of a French sea captain, Audubon emigrated to the United States partly to look after a small farm his father had bought in Pennsylvania but also to avoid Napoleon’s draft. He tried his hand at a variety of professions in various Ohio Valley towns–shopkeeper, traveling merchant, mill owner–but none of these ventures worked out very well. In 1819, in the midst of an economic downturn, he was forced to declare bankruptcy.
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By 1824 Audubon had accumulated enough paintings to look for a publisher. He traveled to Philadelphia, then the scientific capital of the United States. Unfortunately, he made some enemies. His brash manner and French flamboyance–he had long, flowing hair and liked to dress in frontier-style buckskin robes–served him well in the west and in New Orleans but not on the east coast. Audubon finally had to travel to London to find an engraver, and it was not until 1826 that the first plates of The Birds of America were printed.
Many scientists have panned Audubon’s paintings, too. One of the most famous plates in The Birds of America shows a rattlesnake climbing into a mockingbird nest. Four frenzied, squawking adult mockingbirds fill the frame with a baroque whirl of activity. Almost immediately after the plate’s publication, naturalists accused Audubon of embellishment. They said that rattlesnakes don’t climb trees, and that furthermore the fangs were all wrong.
In most natural-history art of that era lifeless specimens were posed against just such white backgrounds. But most of Audubon’s birds were given real settings. He was the first major artist of natural history to surround birds with plants, nests, and full landscapes. He was the first to depict his subjects feeding, fighting, courting, and dying. He was the first to show ecological relationships, even gory ones; it’s not hard to imagine some of his patrons turning away in disgust from his picture of vultures feeding on the head of a deer.
However jewellike and beautiful his paintings, Audubon acknowledged that they were only pale shadows of what he found in the woods on his endless expeditions. Looking now at his works raises the hope, but no conviction, that we will better steward the birds and their environs than did the Americans of Audubon’s own time.
