John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
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himself “far better fitted to study and delineate in the forests than to arrange phrases with sensible grammarian skill,” but his skill with the pen ranks just a bit behind his mastery with the brush.2 His major published work, the five-volume, three-thousand-page Ornithological Biography (1831–1839), came out as a companion piece to The Birds of America, and taken together, the two works make an innovative and interactive reading/viewing experience. In the time of Audubon’s life, in fact, when newspapers and other publications reproduced any number of chapters and extracts from his writings, probably as many people read Audubon’s words as saw his birds.
We still need to pay attention to his writing. In addition to producing the massive Ornithological Biography, Audubon filled thousands more pages as a prodigious journal keeper and letter writer, and those more personal documents provide an immense source of insight into the complicated persona emerging from behind the more famous paintings.3 Many of those personal writings may not have been so personal after all. He seldom seemed to be writing for himself alone, in the self-reflective, therapeutic sense that many people keep journals today, but always with the notion that someone else would be reading—his wife, his sons, perhaps some broader audience, but certainly someone.
Audubon’s sense of audience became more immediately evident in Ornithological Biography, in which he repeatedly wrote directly to his “Kind Reader”—a phrase that he used in some variation well over three hundred times—reaching out to embrace the reader as a fellow student of nature, sometimes even as a fictive companion in the search for birds.4 Audubon sought to create a relationship with the reader—other gentlemen of science, to be sure, but equally important, ordinary people as well—that put himself squarely in the picture as a common man of the American frontier, even as he desperately sought the elevated status of a man of science in the early republic. By looking at Audubon’s art and science, his painting and writing, his elite and popular audiences, we can situate his achievements in the larger cultural context of the new nation.
That larger context became a critical element of Audubon’s relationship with the reader. His writings went well beyond birds, well beyond scientific description. In the first volume of Ornithological Biography, he generously offered to take his reader out of the “mazes of descriptive ornithology … by presenting you with occasional descriptions of the scenery and manners of this land.”5 Thus after every five chapters about birds, he would insert an “Episode” about something else altogether, typically an action-packed anecdote about his own experiences of tracking, shooting, and painting birds, or often some tale about other people—and quite often a tall tale at that. Audubon seldom let modesty (or, in many cases, accuracy) stand in the way of a good story, particularly about his own exploits. He once admitted in the pages of Ornithological Biography that if he could “with propriety deviate from my proposed method, the present volume would contain less of the habits of birds than of those of the youthful days of an American woodsman.”6 He stuck to his obligations to birds well enough, but, still, Ornithological Biography contains so many passages about Audubon himself that it could well be called “Ornithologist’s Autobiography.”
In whatever form, in fact, whether his published works or personal journals, Audubon almost always wrote about his life, and he was almost always writing a “Life,” crafting various parts of the Audubon story that would both shape and reinforce the role he would so brashly embrace. Reading Audubon gives us by far the best way to see the way he created an always expressive, sometimes audacious, and certainly self-conscious sense of himself as an artist, as a scientist, and, above all, as a larger-than-life, self-fashioned symbol, the “American Woodsman.”
Audubon’s America, America’s Audubon
In writing about Audubon’s life myself, I do not offer this book as a “Life,” as a standard biography, at least not in the sense of providing a chronological, cradle-to-grave account. Over a dozen biographies of Audubon have taken that approach, typically putting The Birds of America at the center, even the apex, of the narrative.7 But chronology goes only so far in exploring a life as richly textured and culturally expressive as Audubon’s. Instead, this book follows a different approach. To be sure, the first chapter explores the murky-seeming circumstances of Audubon’s birth, and the last opens with transatlantic notices of his death; in between, the fourth chapter focuses on the most famous achievement of his life, the publication of The Birds of America. But The Birds of America defines only one aspect of Audubon’s Great Work. Another was Audubon himself, and his work on that went well beyond his birds.
In its larger trajectory, this book departs from the day-to-day details and offers another way to look at Audubon, exploring more topically, and therefore perhaps more fully, the most meaningful elements of his life. Largely untrained in both art and science, he became one of the most notable men of his era in both, celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. And in both art and science, it is the process of Audubon’s becoming that matters most. Audubon worked for years to make himself a prolific and superb bird artist, and ultimately he succeeded as no one had before or, arguably, since. He also struggled to become a legitimate man of science, doggedly seeking and ultimately taking his place within the transatlantic scientific community. Equally important, though, he also chose to portray himself as an emblematic figure of his era. By devising the guise of the American Woodsman—a highly masculinized amalgam of art and science, but still a friendly denizen of the frontier—he defined a self-promoting notion of national identity that he also perfected in pursuit of transatlantic fame. The American Woodsman wasn’t just a catchy nickname; it was a well-chosen role. Audubon didn’t just live his life; he performed it.
He seemed perfect for the part. Art and science have many things in common: imagination, creativity, and the attempt to discover and express some fundamental form of information that we commonly call, for want of a more precise term, truth. Today we most commonly find art and science joined together in the modern university, where colleges of arts and sciences give the various academic disciplines an institutional home and a symbolic, if sometimes uneasy, union. In the early American republic, however, universities did not have the depth or diversity they do now. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the University of Pennsylvania’s champion of natural history, Benjamin Smith Barton, complained about the intellectual offerings of American colleges, lamenting that “withered and dead” languages still defined the core curriculum, and, “as yet, little attention is paid to the study of nature in the United-States.”8 The antebellum era defined a time when art and science came together not so much in a complex institution, but more often in a single, albeit exceptional, individual. Audubon was certainly the most prominent of those, a man who stood squarely at the intersection of art and science at a time when natural history was becoming entwined with national history.
Audubon’s America was a nation whose ambition seemed boundless. Between the time of the American Revolution and the Civil War, the United States embarked upon a geographically expansive and culturally possessive project, seeking to secure its hold on the continent while spreading over it at the same time. Artists and scientists played almost as much a role in that process as soldiers and settlers. Mapmakers extended the boundaries of the nation on paper, and in the process they helped people imagine the land of the future. Landscape painters depicted the American environment in large-scale, emotion-laden scenes, giving a dramatic, almost daunting power to nature that seemed to require heroic perseverance from its human inhabitants. Naturalists took it as their special mission to give greater emphasis and importance to scientific inquiry that focused on the beauty and abundance of the natural world on the American side of the Atlantic. To do so, they engaged in a massive collective (and quite often competitive) taxonomic attempt to discover, catalog, and classify all the species of America and, in many cases, to define them as distinctly American.
Audubon played his part as well as anyone could. He did not simply paint his birds as stiff specimens for close ornithological examination; he gave them life and location, creating animated images embedded in the American landscape. His unremitting quest to collect and depict hundreds of avian species represented an act of artistic and scientific possession: The Birds of America implicitly meant “The Birds of the United States.” No one—not even illustrious landscape artists like Asher B. Durand