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John James
Audubon
EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES
Series editors:
Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher
Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
John James
Audubon
The Nature of the American Woodsman
Gregory Nobles
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nobles, Gregory H., author.
Title: John James Audubon : the nature of the American woodsman / Gregory Nobles.
Other titles: Early American studies.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Series: Early American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046873 | ISBN 9780812248944 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Audubon, John James, 1785–1851. | Naturalists—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC QL31.A9 N63 2017 | DDC 508.092 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046873
To Phil Terrie,good writer, good birder, good friend
Contents
Introduction. Creating Art, Science, and Self
1. Becoming Audubon, Becoming American
2. Hearing Birds, Heeding Their Call
3. Making an Odyssey for Art and Ornithology
4. Going into Business with The Birds of America
5. Struggling for Status in Science
6. Suffering for Science as the “American Woodsman”
7. Putting People into the Picture
8. Exploring the Ornithology of Ordinary People
9. Forging a Legacy, Finding a Discipline
10. Bringing Audubon Back to Life
Color Plates
John James
Audubon
Introduction
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