have contributed a bit to Audubon’s personal self-esteem: “Seldom before My coming to New Orleans did I think that I was Looked on so favourably by the fair sex as I Have Discovered Lately.”35
Making a Living on Lessons
Audubon’s most promising opportunity came in the summer of 1821, when a wealthy woman, Mrs. Lucy Gray Pirrie, invited him to tutor her teenaged daughter, Eliza, in the necessary arts for a young woman—what Audubon would describe as “Drawing, Music, Dancing, Arithmetick, and Some trifling acquirements such as Working Hair &c”—at the family plantation, Oakley, over a hundred miles upriver from New Orleans, near Bayou Sarah. At first, Audubon figured he had “one hundred Diferent Plans … as Opposite as Could be to this,” but the pay was decent—sixty dollars a month, along with a room in the plantation house for Audubon and his assistant, young Mason—so he took the deal and “found Myself bound for several Months on a Farm in Louisiana.”36
Oakley was more than just a farm—a commodious house, full of family members and “constant Transient Visitors,” surrounded by extensive grounds and cotton fields, worked by slaves—and Audubon did more than just teach drawing and such. He did his duty as artistic tutor for his “Aimiable Pupil Miss Eliza Pirrie,” but he also spent as much time as he could on his own much-preferred project, “Hunting and Drawing My Cherished Birds of America.” On his way to the plantation in June 1821, he realized how refreshed he felt to be out of New Orleans:
The Aspect of the Country entirely New to us distracted My Mind from those objects that are the occupation of My Life—the Rich Magnolia covered with its Odiferous Blossoms, The Holy, the Beech, the Tall Yellow Poplar, the Hilly ground, even the Red Clay I Looked at with amasement,—such entire Change in so Short a time, appears, often supernatural, and surrounded Once More by thousands of Warblers & thrushes, I enjoyd Nature.37
Figure 5. Oakley Plantation House, Audubon State Historic Site, St. Francisville, Louisiana. Photo by Audubon State Historic Site staff.
During his four months at Oakley, in fact, he wrote very little in his journal about working with Eliza, but page after page about birds: lists of species he had seen or hoped to see, extended descriptions of some of the ones he shot, and, best of all, a couple of accounts of first sightings.
The good times at Oakley came to an end, however, when Audubon was fired from his position. Eliza had been ill for a month, her doctor had warned against continuing her lessons with Audubon, and Mrs. Pirrie—never an altogether pleasant person, in Audubon’s estimation—dismissed him on October 10, 1821. Seeking just a little more time to continue his ornithological work, Audubon appealed to Mr. Pirrie, a “Man of Strong Mind but extremely Weak of Habit,” who drank too much and who, even in his sober moments, seemed to cower in the face of his wife’s “Violent Passions”—the plantation was hers from a previous marriage, after all, and he was just the next husband, and a fairly feckless one at that. Still, Audubon managed to hang on for another five days, an awkward time when he felt “a remarkable Coolness … from the Ladies,” but kept up a “close application to My Ornithology[,] Writting every day from Morning until Night, Correcting, arranging from My Scattered Notes all My Ideas.” He and Mason finally “left this abode of unfortunate Opulence without a single Sigh of regret,” but Audubon found it painful to leave the “sweet Woods around us … for in them We allways enjoyd Peace … [and] I often felt as if anxious to retain the fill of My lungs with the purer air that Circulate through them.”38
Back they went to New Orleans, then, and back to the uncertain work of making a bare living through art—but not the sort of art Audubon wanted to do. From October 15, the day he arrived back in the city, through the end of 1821, the journal contains a series of dispirited entries about looking for work (“visited several Public Institutions where I cannot say that I Was very politely received”), enduring the jealousy of competitors in teaching art (“My Style of giving Lessons and the high rate I charge for My Tuition have procured Me the Ill will of Every other Artist in the City”), and actually having to give art lessons again and again (“Gave lessons at Mrs. Brand,” “Gave a Lesson to Miss Pamar,” “Gave My Lessons all round”). Finally, on December 18, Audubon recorded one much happier note: “My Wife & My Two sons arrived at 12 ’o’clock all in good health.” After fourteen disappointing and lonely months without his family and “all that renders Life agreeable to Me,” Audubon mustered up his gratitude and “thanked My Maker for this Mark of Mercy.”39
Louisiana Ornithology
All Audubon had ever really wanted in Louisiana was birds—birds and enough paying work to allow him to keep finding and drawing more birds. And draw birds he certainly did: Well over a third of the avian images that would later fill the 435 plates of The Birds of America, and at least 75 of the 100 images in the first volume, originated during his Mississippi-Louisiana period in the early 1820s; some of them—for instance, his near-iconic image of the now-extinct Carolina Parrot (or Carolina Parakeet), which he began at the Pirrie’s Oakley Plantation in 1821 and completed in New Orleans in 1822—have become emblematic of his art.40 By the same token, the pages of Audubon’s journal that cover his time in Louisiana offer extensive lists and descriptions of the species he saw there, and references to the region recur throughout the five volumes of Ornithological Biography, such as his “having studied the habits” of the Purple Gallinule “under every advantage in Louisiana, and especially in the neighbourhood of New Orleans.”41 Audubon had chosen his destination well, and he made the most of the ornithological opportunity, getting down to work right after his arrival.
No sooner had he settled into New Orleans in early January 1821 than he “took My Gun, rowed out to the edge of the Eddy and killed a Fish Crow.” Thus begins a series of ornithological entries in Audubon’s journal, always searching for birds to draw, whether dead ones bought in the city’s market or live ones shot in the surrounding environs. When he killed the first Fish Crow, for instance, “hundreds flew to him, and appeared as if about to Carry him off, but they soon found it to their Interest to let me have him.” Audubon also bagged the birds common to coastal areas—pelicans, gulls, cormorants, ducks, geese—and welcomed the early arrival of migrants in the mild winter weather. “I had the pleasure of remarking thousands of purple martins travelling eastwardly,” he wrote in the second week of February 1821, when the temperature sat at 68 degrees, and ten days later, he saw “Three Immense Flocks of Bank Swallows that past over Me with the rapidity of a Storm.” Even though he seemed surprised at the birds’ early arrival, he felt “pleased to see these arbingers of Spring,” figuring that they would make it to Kentucky in about a month. Even if he stayed within the city, he could find that “the Market is regularly furnished with the English Snipe … Robins Blue Wingd Teals Common Teals, Spoon Bill Ducks, Malards, Snow Geese, Canada Geese, Many Cormorants, Coots, Water Hens, Tell Tale Godwits … Yellow Shank Snipes, some Sand Hills Cranes, Strings of Blew Warblers, Cardinal Grosbeaks, Common Turtle Doves, Golden Wingd Wood Peckers &c.”42
As February turned to March, then April, Audubon marked the migrations that came and went during the Louisiana spring, noting that “to My Astonishment, the Many Species of Warblers, Thrushes &c that Were numerous during the Winter have all Moved on Eastwardly,” but then, likewise to his surprise, he “heard the Voice of a Warbler new to Me, but could Not reach it.”43 That summer, when he and Joseph Mason moved to the Pirrie plantation at Bayou Sarah, Audubon took care of his tutor duties well enough, but he more happily spent hours, sometimes several days, ranging through the woods and relishing the profusion of big birds (ibises, woodpeckers, herons) and small (flycatchers, orioles, warblers of all sorts). After that job came to an abrupt end and he moved back to New Orleans, he still took pleasure in recording sightings of birds of all sorts—“Green Back Swallows, Gamboling over the City and the River the Whole day”—and sometimes making very detailed ornithological notes; his extensive description of the Brown Pelican covers two complete pages, and his journal ends with brief descriptions of over sixty “Water Birds of the United States.”44 Even now, Audubon’s Mississippi