9781422271728

MASTERS OF ART

John James Audubon was born in 1785 in Saint-Dominique—now Haiti—of a French father and Creole mother. He was raised in France but immigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen, living on his family’s farm near Philadelphia. In 1808, he married Lucy Bakewell, who agreed to support him while he completed his ornithological portfolio. Unable to find backers in America, Audubon moved to England, where his magnum opus was published. He produced an octavo edition (with some additional Western species) in 1843, and between 1842 and 1845, with the help of his sons, published a book on mammals, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. He eventually settled in the north of Manhattan Island overlooking the Hudson River, where he died in 1851.

THE ART OF AUDUBON

T he results of a period of world exploration were consolidated in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when descriptions of newly discovered animals and plants were published in a series of great works. The brightness and variety of colors and patterns made birds a particularly favored subject for illustrated books. Large multi-volume works were often sold, and subscribers received many small parts, usually sections of pages or some illustrated plates, which might be printed over several years. The purchaser would then have them bound to form a book. Subscriptions were needed to ensure that the parts continued to appear, and authors were simultaneously hunting for subscribers, even while they were collecting information and writing or illustrating their books. It was against this background, having failed to get the support that he needed in his own country, that in

1826 John James LaForest Audubon appeared in Liverpool, England, dressed for effect as an American backwoodsman and with an impressive portfolio of his paintings to exhibit. He traveled to Edinburgh, where exhibitions of his work attracted favorable public interest. He was aware that Alexander Wilson’s mainly textual work on American birds would already be known, and he needed his to outshine it. Audubon’s vivid bird portraits, full of movement and vitality, caught the imagination, and he daringly proposed to illustrate the American birds on the largest available paper size, double elephant folio, which would allow most species to be shown life-size. It was a huge proposition. This was Audubon’s first great venture into the field of bird portraiture. He had had a varied past, having been born nearly forty years earlier, in 1785, at Les Cayes, Saint-Dominique, on what is now the island of Haiti. His

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