Creating Art, Science, and Self

      Kind Reader,—Should you derive from the perusal of the following pages … a portion of the pleasure which I have felt in collecting the materials for their composition, my gratitude will be ample, and the compensation for all my labours will be more than, perhaps, I have a right to expect from an individual to whom I am as yet unknown.

      —John James Audubon, “Introductory Address,” in Ornithological Biography

      If anyone had been offering the nineteenth-century version of a MacArthur “genius grant,” John James Audubon should have had one. To the extent that genius stems from abundant quantities of imagination, talent, and tenacity, Audubon repeatedly demonstrated all three. He dedicated almost his entire adult life to a remarkably challenging, maybe crazy-seeming commitment to depict, in both paint and print, every bird that flew over and within the United States. He succeeded in that task as no one had done before, and he did so at a great personal sacrifice, with almost no external support. He certainly could have used the MacArthur money.

      Today, the main source of Audubon’s enduring claim to genius remains the remarkable visual record he left as an artist. His major work—his “Great Work,” as he liked to call it—was the famous collection of avian art, The Birds of America, which came out in a process of piecemeal publication between 1827 and 1838.¹ Bound together in four huge, heavy volumes, the 435 plates of bird images in the Double Elephant Folio edition define one of the most dramatic achievements in American art. Audubon’s massive work has always been, almost by definition, a rare book, and it has recently become the most costly. In March 2000, a Double Elephant Folio sold at auction for $8,802,500, not only setting a record auction price for a book of natural history, but also surpassing earlier sales of the Gutenberg Bible ($5,390,000 in 1987) and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ($7,565,396 in 1998) to set a world record amount for a printed book of any sort. Ten years later, in 2010, the price rose even higher, and a complete set of The Birds of America fetched $11.5 million.

      But whatever its record-setting size and price, The Birds of America does not stand alone as the sole measure of Audubon’s significance. His bird images are only the most visible—and now, of course, the most valuable—aspects of his larger project. In addition to being a skilled painter, he was also a remarkably prolific writer. Audubon wrote consistently, almost incessantly, throughout his adult years, and his outpouring