Audubon: artist, ornithologist, odd duck
John James Audubon’s name may be synonymous today with birds and conservation, but it didn’t start out that way.
His story is classic Americana: a blend of self-taught skills, scrappy enterprise, amazing success and devastating failure. Throughout his life, Audubon reinvented himself as pioneer, shopkeeper, portrait artist, taxidermist, ornithologist, instructor, painter of wildlife and Wild West adventurer. He made a small fortune, lost it and spent years scrambling to make ends meet. After he died in 1851, his widow, desperately in need, sold the original watercolors for Audubon’s great enterprise, “Birds of America,” to the New York Historical Society for $4,000. The copper plates for the etchings were sold as scrap metal.
An intriguing historical exhibition “John James Audubon, American Artist and Naturalist” brings us 60 of the luscious hand-colored Double Elephant engravings from “Birds of America” that cemented Audubon’s reputation. Even better, the show rounds out the picture of Audubon’s life with a small selection of original paintings, letters, works by his contemporaries and personal possessions that indicate the character and passions of the man - and the mood of the times. We get to see the spectrum of Audubon’s creative work, from clunky to sublime.
The show includes a documentary video about Audubon’s life, so plan on spending some time. And keep in mind that light in the gallery is muted to protect the fragile paper and pigments. You may want to bring a magnifying lens or reading glasses to take in, among other things, that teensy spider that Audubon recorded dropping into the frame of one of his “Birds.”
In Audubon’s time, people reveled in the abundance and diversity of wildlife on the continent. Conservation wasn’t a concern. A display case of vintage women’s head gear, sprouting with exotic feathers, stands as proof. “I shot, I drew, I looked on nature only - beyond this I really cared not,” Audubon once said. For him, loving birds went hand in hand with shooting them, then examining their intricacies before wiring their wings and legs into lifelike positions to paint.
In general, the wholesale slaughter of creatures was viewed as sport. Take the shocking story of passenger pigeons. Audubon’s image of two of them sweetly billing on a branch comes with a text panel detailing the bird’s extinction. In the 19th century, 5 billion of the pigeons were thought to live in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana alone. By 1914, deforestation and mass slaughter had completely wiped them out. Every single one of them.
Other interesting facts: In 1926, when Audubon was lecturing in Edinburgh, among those in his audience was the young medical student Charles Darwin. Audubon’s “Birds of America” was published from 1826-39 in four volumes, each weighing 50 pounds. There were 260-280 sets printed, each containing 435 hand-colored plates, detailing 506 species and 1,065 individual birds. The set sold originally for $1,000.
An accounting ledger lays out the expenses Audubon carefully kept on the project. He was often broke, and at one point his wife was forced to sell their furniture. Now, of course, anything connected with Audubon is highly collectible. At auction in 2000, a set of “Birds of America” sold for nearly $9 million.
The oddities of Audubon’s character come across in this show. He liked to dress in backwoods gear and boast of his connection to legendary trailblazer Daniel Boone. An oil portrait of Boone in this exhibit is attributed to Audubon, who apparently claimed to have painted it from memory 20 years after they met. That’s unlikely. Evidence points to it being modeled on a portrait of Boone by Chester Harding.
So what if our man Audubon was a bit of a blowhard? It doesn’t diminish his appeal. In one display case, a mounted snowy owl, one of Audubon’s specimens, perches regally at one end. At the other end, looking strangely similar, is a white plaster bust of the man. They haunt the exhibition like ghosts of another era, when the wildlife and the resources of the Earth seemed unlimited.
Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com