John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
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picture in both size and prominence.43 The bird’s distinctive markings, particularly the reddish band that identifies it as a female, are sharp and well defined—but perhaps too much so, certainly more so than would be the case on a real bird. Audubon’s kingfisher—drawn in 1808, well before Wilson came into his store, much less into his life—was also a female, but rendered with a better representation of the subtlety and irregularity of the color patterns and the texture of the feathers, especially in the bird’s crest. One might acknowledge, of course, that the materials Audubon used in rendering his kingfisher in 1808—pastel, graphite, and ink—allowed for more subtlety than the final engraved version of Wilson’s image. One might also complain—as some critics indeed have—that both Wilson’s and Audubon’s portrayals of the Belted Kingfisher seem a bit stiff, still adhering to the standard conventions of avian art by presenting the bird in profile and certainly not displaying the often dramatic vivacity that would later come to characterize Audubon’s art.44 Still, if Wilson had even a glance at Audubon’s kingfisher—and it seems highly likely that he did—he would have had good reason to be impressed, perhaps even worried. Audubon had already become a remarkably avid observer and gifted illustrator of birds, and anyone who saw his work would have to take note of his skill. Alexander Wilson certainly must have.45
The artistic comparison, even competition, leads to a second question: What might have happened if the Audubon-Wilson story had had a happier ending? How might the course of American art and science have been affected if Wilson had lived longer and the two had indeed become collaborators, as Audubon said he had suggested? The two men clearly shared a common passion, and the work it required might also have been shared. The attempt to depict every bird in America defined an enormous, almost impossible-seeming agenda, certainly the sort of undertaking that might invite goodwill and a mutually respectful effort, especially in a society that did not yet have well-established science departments in research universities or substantial government funding to provide employment or ensure support. Neither Wilson nor Audubon had the personal financial resources to establish himself as an independent gentleman-naturalist, but both did have seemingly unlimited ambition, unflagging energy, and unmistakable artistic skill.
In the end, Audubon surpassed Wilson enough to claim a degree of celebrity and success that no other American naturalist had ever known—or, arguably, would know since—but he could scarcely see or talk about his own work without taking its measure next to that of Wilson. Throughout his long quest to illustrate all the species that would eventually grace the pages of The Birds of America, Audubon frequently relied on Wilson’s American Ornithology as a ready reference. Even more often, however, he took it as a point of competitive departure, taking posthumous potshots at its author for decades to come.
Wilson’s allies shot back, pursuing a professional struggle that became very personal, attacking Audubon with an intensity that may well have even exceeded Wilson’s own, had he lived. Thanks to the work of Wilson’s Philadelphia friends and defenders, Audubon would confront challenges to his ornithological accuracy and even integrity, with accusations (apparently true in a few cases) of having copied some of Wilson’s images and published them as his own.46 Wilson would forever be the “Father of American Ornithology” in the minds of his admirers, the original standard against which all subsequent work must be measured. No matter how much Audubon believed himself to have far exceeded that standard, he would always have his Scottish predecessor hovering like a grim ghost over his life. The edgy 1810 encounter between the two remained a problematic issue in Audubon’s personal history and in the history of The Birds of America, later creating artistic and scientific comparisons that Audubon could never escape.47
In 1842, an American author writing under the nom de plume Christopher North celebrated the prospect of Wilson and Audubon in an ornithological pantheon: “‘Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon!’ We call on them—and they appear and answer to their names … they grasp each other’s hand.… They are brothers, and their names will go down together … in all the highest haunts of ornithological science.”48 By that time, however, any notion of ornithological solidarity between the two had to be a fantasy. Instead of figuratively grasping each other’s hand, they might more likely have been portrayed clutching each other’s throats. Any notion of scientific collaboration had long since taken on a much more menacing aspect, leaving a legacy of unseemly enmity and competition that lasted throughout their lives, and even beyond.
First Taste of Financial Failure
In the meantime, at least for the decade after 1810, Audubon still had to take account of the other pressing imperative in his life: making a living in business. In writing about his professional trajectory, he almost always claimed to have pursed his passion for birds while letting pretty much everything else go. He was, he admitted, neither assiduous nor successful in his various business ventures, always having his eye more on the skies than on the bottom line: “Birds were birds then as now,” he wrote, “and my thoughts were ever and anon turning toward them as the objects of my greatest delight. I shot, I drew, I looked on nature only; my days were happy beyond human conception, and beyond this I really cared not.”49 But he had to care about his life beyond birds, of course, because he had obligations to a wife and children and, for a while, to his friend and business partner, Rozier—but only for a while.
While Audubon’s family always remained a source of emotional, sometimes even sentimental, attachment, Rozier soon fell from grace in Audubon’s narrative of his Kentucky days. Rozier never took on quite the treacherous aspect of the despised Dacosta, but he did serve as a money-focused foil to Audubon’s emerging self-portrayal as a man with a higher-seeming focus on art and science, too busy with the birds to spend time with business.
Soon after the in-store encounter with Alexander Wilson, Audubon wrote, he and Rozier “became discouraged at Louisville, and I longed to have a wider range.” He would readily admit the fundamental flaw in the management of the original mercantile operation: “Louisville did not give us up, but we gave up Louisville. I could not bear to give the attention required by my business, and which, indeed, every business calls for, and, therefore, my business abandoned me.”50 He made only a tepid confession about his lack of attention, however, pointing instead to his fascination with pursuing his larger calling, all the while using the more practical-seeming Rozier to make the comparative point: “I seldom passed a day without drawing a bird, or noting something respecting its habits, Rozier meantime attending the counter,” Audubon wrote. “I could relate many curious anecdotes about him, but never mind them; he made out to grow rich, and what more could he wish for?”51 All Audubon seemed to wish for was being out of the store.
Instead, they both got out of the town and into another store, this one 125 miles farther down the Ohio River, in an even newer and less developed town, Henderson, Kentucky. One early observer unkindly described Henderson as a town of “about twenty houses, and inhabited by a people whose doom is fixed.”52 To be sure, Henderson had a population of only 159 in 1810, but doom did not seem to be the town’s destiny, at least in Audubon’s eyes at the time. The village was “quite small,” Audubon admitted, “but our neighbours were friendly.… The woods were amply stocked with game, the river with fish; and now and then the hoarded sweets of the industrious bees were brought from some hollow tree to our little table.”53 Into that scene of Arcadian simplicity and contentment, Audubon added only a brief, half-sentence reference to Rozier: “I had then a partner, a ‘man of business.’” The quotation marks around “man of business” served to separate Rozier’s commercial inclinations from the “sports of the forest and river” preferred by Audubon, who “thought chiefly of procuring supplies of fish and fowl.”54
Audubon did not belabor the difference any further in Ornithological Biography—he never mentioned Rozier again, certainly not by name—but in the more private space of the autobiographical “Myself,” he offered an extended anecdote about their different approaches to business and perhaps to life in general. Soon after arriving in Henderson, Audubon writes, he and Rozier took a flatboat-load of whiskey and other goods down the Ohio River, headed to the Mississippi River to sell Kentucky’s best beverage to settlers in the Missouri Territory. Starting out in a snowstorm in late December 1810,