June 25, 2012 • 28 mins
After John James Audubon finished his book, he sought out a publisher. While his image turned off Philadelphia's intellectuals, he charmed Great Britain. In this episode, curator Michael Inman joins us to explain the publication of Birds of America.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fairy Daddy and I'm doubling in chark Reboarding, and
we're picking off where we left off on illustrator and
naturalist John James Audubon. And in the last episode we
(00:23):
covered Audubon's illegitimate birth to a French ship's captain and
his mistress in what is now Haiti right before the
Haitian Revolution, and after making it through the French Revolution
as well, John James was finally moved by his father
to Pennsylvania in order to avoid conscription in Napoleon's army.
(00:43):
And it's at that point that Audubon really became kind
of an early American renaissance man, someone who is equally
at home dancing, fencing and dressing and fine clothes, lying
in brush for hours, watching and sketching birds, or studying
up on ornithology in the natural world. But it wasn't
until eighteen nineteen, after he had lost his business in
(01:04):
the Panic, that Audubon began focusing in earnest on a
monumental project, and that was illustrating all of the birds
in all of America will include portions of an interview
as we mentioned before with Michael Ennan in this episode.
He's the curator of the Rare Books division at the
New York Public Library, who, in addition to being a
(01:24):
big Audubon buff himself, shared lots of interesting information with
us about the book. So by eighteen twenty four where
we left off, after years of sketching birds and traveling
around the country looking for new species, John James Audubon
was finally ready to find a publisher, and so his
wife and two sons had set up their home base
(01:45):
near New Orleans, where the boys could be educated and
Lucy could teach deportment and piano to the children of
wealthy planters there. But Audubon decided that Philadelphia, which was
still at that time the intellectual and cultural capital of
the United States, would be the best place for him
to drum up some interest in this project of his.
(02:06):
It's important to remember that as beautiful as Audubon's drawing
still are today, they must have seemed completely novel and
breathtaking at the time, maybe even shocking to some people.
When Audubon presented his portfolio to Charles Lucienne, Bonaparte, who
was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences and
Napoleon's nephew. Bonaparte was just blown away by them, and
(02:28):
he started parading Audubon around town to meet artists and scientists.
And Audubon had this kind of rugged, brash way about him.
He'd really cultivated that frontiersman image that we talked about
in the first part of this podcast. So he probably
surprised a lot of people that he met. But his
big mistake was starting to criticize American ornithology and specifically
(02:50):
the late Alexander Wilson and his works, who Michael Nman
mentioned Wilson a little bit in the last podcast. Yeah,
and according to William Fowder in American History, Wilson's earlier
incomplete attempt to illustrate the birds of American you know,
this was something he had tried before Audubon was trying.
His attempt at doing that was something that the folks
in Philadelphia were really very proud of, and they considered
(03:12):
Wilson to be the father of American ornithology, and they
considered his book as one of America's first great scientific works,
plus just a really nice book. So here comes Backwoods,
Audubon out of nowhere, criticizing Wilson, talking about mistakes and
Wilson's drawings, and even accusing him of kind of a
type of bird hunting plagiarism. He said that when they
(03:34):
met back in Kentucky, he helped Wilson bag a type
of warbler that he was searching for and didn't get
any credit for that. So instead of finding a publisher
in Philadelphia with all of this talk, Audubon found himself
shut out instead, shut out of society. Michael Inman actually
described it to us as him being quote roundly snubbed,
But it became clear to him that Europe was just
(03:58):
going to be the better place to go. There would
if you were a Wilfon fans there, so he was
less likely to offend people. There would be more people
with deep book buying pockets, and most importantly, there wouldn't
be real life North American birds to just look out
in your backyard, so you might be more inclined to
buy this very expensive work he was planning. So Audubon
(04:19):
set off for Liverpool in eighty six with letters of
introduction and his portfolio in tow and according to Richard
Rhodes and Smithsonian Magazine. One of these letters of introduction
was to Lucy's sister Anne, who married an englishman. He
was so rugged looking though he knocked at the door,
and he was actually asked not to call against It
(04:41):
seemed like a pretty unpromising start if your own sister
in law turns you away, But that actually wasn't the case.
Even though his in laws didn't receive them with open arms,
Audubon's non in law connections proved to be a lot
more promising that Those same qualities that made him unpopular
in Philadelphia made him huge hit in Great Britain. And
(05:01):
Michael told us a little bit more about Auto Vonn's
reception abroad. Almost immediately he became sort of the toast
of English society that season. He was sort of celebrated
as this rugged American woodsman, and he did a great
deal to try to perpetuate that sort of romantic image.
His hair was long and flowing. He sort of looked
(05:21):
something probably like Daniel Boone to them, and in fact
that the English at that time were very enamored of
that romantic ideal of Daniel Boone or of um, you know,
these sorts of uh, images that would come out of
the novel of James Fenimore Cooper, for example, that sort
of frontiersman image. And so he played upon that and
traded upon it, and he set upon or set about
(05:45):
showing his images, his drawings and sketches to uh the
leading minds of England at that time, and was embraced.
Um he they were again they were shocked because it
was unlike anything they had seen. But it wasn't He
didn't encounter that sort of snobbishness. I think that he
had encountered in in Philadelphia and throughout the United States,
(06:07):
and that probably had something to do with the United
States then being a still fairly new country and perhaps
a little bit insecure about its place in the world.
In In in England, they were of course far more
been around a very long time, and so they were
perhaps a little bit more receptive um two new ideas
or ways of depicting the world. So with that, Daniel
(06:29):
Boone left of the Mohicans kind of persona to recommend him.
Audubon started renting out halls for art shows, started spicing
up his lectures by providing entertainment himself. He'd talk about
what he had seen in his travels to to draw
all these birds. He had lecture in his buckskin costume
with his hair greased back with bear fat and just
(06:52):
talk about frontier life. He would even imitate birds, he
would imitate war calls. He must have been quite a
one man oh for for these audiences. Yeah, I guess
these audiences had sort of romanticized this version of America
that he was representing to them. But in Edinburgh he
also connected with engraver William Lazars, who, despite having several
(07:14):
other large projects underway, agreed to take on this really
massive task of printing Birds of America. And this would
include it would be an ongoing process as they planned it,
with Audubon painting and adding new birds and Lazar's engraving them.
And Michael told us how Lazar's would have gone about
engraving the first few drawings and how the book was
planned to be released bit by bit. Here's what he
(07:37):
had to say. The basic process of completing the the engravings,
uh was that the someone in the printing shop would
trace using tracing paper essentially would trace the watercolor, getting
the general outlines, and then that that tracing paper would
then be transferred to the copper plate, and that would
(08:00):
be done by basically taking the the transfer paper which
had the lead image on it, and it would be
rubbed essentially onto the plate. The plate itself would have
a wax ground across it, which would pick up enough
of the the traced image that then someone could then
(08:22):
take a burain, which is essentially like a needle, and
then trace those lines on the copper plate, scooping out
that wax ground only where the lines appear. The plate
is then put into an acid bath, and depending on
how long the plate is left in the acid bath,
that will affect how how deeply the acid eats into
(08:43):
the plate. And the deeper the the the acid eats
into the plate, the darker the line or the broader
the line. So it allows you to achieve a darker
image and also vary the width of the line. And
it's something that skilled engraver or someone who's used to
working with the medium of etching can do in a
very controlled manner, and that was something that Lazar's or
(09:06):
the people in his printing shop could do. So Audubon's
plan for printing Birds of America was fairly straightforward in
the sense that it was done through subscription, which was
not uncommon at that time. That was something that was
common in the book trade, especially for larger works that
promised to be published over a period of years. Uh
(09:27):
and Audubon projected at the outset that it would take
him about fourteen years to finally finished printing Birds of America,
and his plan was that he would publish the work
by subscription serially, that there would be five numbers or
or sort of packets of images that would be issued
(09:49):
per year, with five individual plates per number. There would
be one large full size image typically within those that
collection of five plates, one medium size image, and then
the last three plates would be smaller birds depicted. So
you have one very large, stunning image typically and then
several smaller images within each packet. The price he estimated
(10:14):
for each UH number was about a hundred and forty pounds,
which would come out to about in today's money, about
eleven thousand pounds for the complete printing run that was
the projection, or about fifty dollars in seven money um.
That would be roughly I believe about nine hundred thousand
dollars in today's money, So it promised to be a
very large undertaking. Both from a financial standpoint and also
(10:38):
from a printing standpoint as well. So Lazar's released about
ten engravings before word got back to Audubon that Lazar's
color as had gone strikes. So these were the people
who would hand color every single print, and this, of
course threatened to draw out what was already going to
be a lengthy printing process. Plus, Audubon hadn't been a
(10:59):
hundred since satisfied with what he had seen the work
he had seen from Lazars, and he was worried too
that Lazars was working on so many projects and wouldn't
be able to dedicate himself fully to this one massive project.
So Michael told us a little bit about what happened
after Audubon got this news. Here's what he had to say.
Audubon saw very quickly that he needed to find another
(11:22):
publisher for Birds of America, and he just almost through happenstance.
He had a letter of introduction to a man in London,
one of the leading printers and publishers in London, a
man named Robert Hovel, and he went to see Hovel
and inquired about the possibility of Hovel taking the project over.
(11:43):
Hovel was again very much in favor of doing it,
because it was such a monumental undertaking. However, he said,
you know, I'm so far advanced in age. You know
this is promising to take fourteen or so years to do.
He said, what I'll agree to do is this, I'll
take over the project. I'll oversee the engravers. I can't
do it myself, but I'll find someone who can engrave
(12:05):
the images up to your standards, and I'll oversee them
and we can continue with the publishing of Birds of
America here in London. So Hovel set about finding and
an engraver um for Birds of America, and he asked
several colleagues, and one of the colleagues said, oh, yes,
I know a young man who can do a great job,
and brought a sample of this person's work, and have
(12:28):
all said, oh, this is fantastic quality work. You know,
this is exactly what I'm looking for. He said, who
is this person? He said, well, if you like the work,
I think you'll like the person. It's your son, Robert
Hovel Jr. Umvelt Robert Hovel Jr. And his father had
done somewhat estranged for a period of years and hadn't
really been in contact too much, but they were able
(12:48):
to reconcile very quickly with the prospect of taking on
this monumental project. Robert Hovel Jr. Came back into the fold,
began working in his father's shop, and uh Audubon asked
Lazars to send the first ten copper plates to Robert Hovel,
which they retouched and reworked and brought up to the
current standard, and they began moving forward from that point on.
(13:12):
So this partnership with Havel and his son proved especially
lucky for Audubon since Havevel was a master of something
called aquitint, an engraving technique that allowed for a tone gradation.
And from a practical side, what this meant was that
the colorless hand coloring all of those prints didn't have
to achieve shading with their paint. They could do a
flat wash. But it also meant a beautiful and product. Michael,
(13:37):
who of course works with the book at the New
York Public Library, said that aquitint really adds depth and
difference between the first ten plates and the later ones
um and that difference is really clear when you look
at them side by side. Okay, so at this point,
the hovels were publishing the completed drawings, and Audubon with
heading back to America every now and then to keep
(13:59):
on local eating and keep on painting new birds to
add to the collection. But he was also writing his
Ornithological Biography, which was kind of an index to go
with the printed book, So an index of all the
species mentioned, complete with tall tales and notes on how
the birds tasted, retention that in the last episode, and
(14:19):
wilderness stories to some of which she just completely made up.
But Audubon's work in Europe and American cities wasn't over either,
because he still had to constantly raise subscriptions and maintain
the orders of his clients, so there was a business
side as well as the artistic side to it. Subscription, though,
did offer some advantages for him, even though it required
(14:41):
this constant maintenance. It did it provided a steady income
stream for a project that ended up costing about nine
hundred thousand dollars in modern currency, and it also allowed
Audubon to get around laws requiring donations of complete sets
to British Library, which would have been a huge loss right,
but subscriptions costing about one thousand, fifty dollars at the
(15:04):
time for a complete set. Only the very rich could
afford these books. Michael told us Some of the subscribers
included George the fourth of England, Charles the tenth of France,
whose subscription actually got interrupted when he was deposed. The
British Museum was another subscriber, the Library of Congress, Daniel Webster,
and John Jacob Astor. According to Audubon's notes, there were
(15:26):
eventually one hundred and sixty one subscribers, though interestingly some
didn't make it through the entire run. As Michael explains
to us here there were there was a financial panic,
a depression in eighteen thirty six, for example, and uh,
that most likely put a dent in the subscription. When
you're forced with deciding if you want to pay for
(15:46):
your your your land, or your home or a book
about birds, probably the book about birds is the first
thing to go. So that was kind of a funny
and to this whole subscription story. But you can imagine
that with Audubon keeping subscribers interested in overseeing the printing
and sketching birds still too, he didn't really have that
(16:07):
much time to spend it home with his family in
New Orleans, and especially during the first few years when
he was really still getting the project off the ground
and still really the toast of the town to doing
those lectures in his buckskins. And it's during this time
that he and his wife had a misunderstanding of miscommunication.
And he had been abroad for about two years and
(16:27):
he was getting lonely. He wrote to Lucy and asked
her to join him in Europe, but somehow or another,
their letters got crossed in the mail and he came
away with the impression that she would only leave Louisiana
when he was finally rich. Well, she thought he just
wasn't interested in her anymore. He was famous now, the
(16:48):
toast of the town, like we said, and just didn't
want his wife hanging around. So finally, according to Rhodes,
Lucy basically wrote, come home. We need to talk, We
need to figure this out, And so Audubon started this
epic trip home. Yeah, he arrived in by U. Sarah
in the middle of the night in November, and he
(17:09):
later wrote about wandering through St. Francisville looking for a
horse to ride the fifteen miles to Lucy school, but
he only found the house is emptied by yellow fever.
Finally he got a horse and he rode through the
night and got to Lucy school at six am, but
he found her already teaching piano. Here's how he described
the scene. I pronounced her name gently, she saw me,
(17:32):
and the next moment I held her in my arms.
Her emotion was so great I feared I had acted rashly.
But tears relieved our hearts. Once more we were together.
So this is why we think audubon story needs to
be a movie, This grand romantic scene. And Lucy and
Audubon basically didn't separate after that, and as their sons
(17:52):
grew up, they joined the family business of producing Birds
of America, something that went on for a very long time,
not wait as long as Audubon expected, but finally completed
publication in eighteen thirty nine after twelve years. So at
this point Audubon was fifty three years old. Birds of
America had been his lifelong project. And Michael Edman told
(18:15):
us a little bit about what somebody like this was
going to do next, and here's what he had to say. Audubon,
uh did not really make any money at all on
the initial publication of Birds on the double elephant folio
volume um and that term referring simply to the size
of the paper that was used, which was the largest
commercially available sized paper that was available at that time.
(18:39):
He made virtually no money on that, and so he
immediately in eighteen thirty nine, as publication well in too
to a close, he began looking for ways to recoup
some of his investment and almost immediately began working on
a smaller version of Birds of America, what was known
(18:59):
as the Royal Octabo version, which is a much smaller
format book format uh and he began printing or having
that published within a matter of a few years. They
began publishing this Royal Octavo format, and because number one,
it was smaller, and also they used a different printing process.
(19:20):
Instead of using etching and engraving and aquatint, they used lithography,
which was much easier to a format a meeting that's
much easier easier to work with. They were able to
publish it much more cheaply, and he made a good
deal of money off of the Royal Octabo version, in
fact enough that he was able to secure his financial
(19:42):
future for pretty much the remainder of his life. It
made um a very large chunk of money for him,
so the family ended up moving to this nice house
in New York, and the unstoppable, audible, and or seemingly
unstoppable also started planning a work on the mammals of America.
So he spent three years on that work that he
(20:04):
was aging rapidly. His eyesight started to fail and he
became senile, and he finally died in eighteen fifty one.
His last lucid words were to invite his visiting brother
in law to go hunting with him. Lucy lived for
many more years after that, eventually running out of money,
though first she sold off the water colors and then
the copper plates to try to support herself, and according
(20:26):
to Souder's article, Audubon had had these sent home after
printing was completed, but the ships sank in the New
York Harbor that destroyed many of the plates, and the
others were damaged in at five warehouse fire. The remaining
plates Lucy sold were being melted down for scrap metal
when the plant manager's son realized what they were and
save the ones that he could. He basically just salvaged
(20:49):
whatever was left. In two thousand two, the Audubon State
Park Museum in Kentucky actually struck prints from one of them,
so they still work. They still work, and today too.
I mean, we've got to talk about the remaining copies
of the book. To those one thousand fifty dollar double
elephant copies of Birds of America go for about eight
million dollars, meaning that most of the one d and
(21:11):
twenty known complete sets are held by museums and universities
and libraries. And I guess we can assume a small
number of very wealthy people. But it really makes sense
from a physical standpoint as well as a financial one,
that these books are held in institutions, considering that they
are very large books once that would be quite difficult
(21:32):
to display in a private home, even a well appointed
private home. I would say they measure thirty nine and
a half inches by twenty nine and a half inches.
And Michael told us a little bit about what a
book of that size is like and how you have
to deal with it, and here's what he had to say.
And each volume weighs over sixty pounds. And I know this,
(21:52):
uh from experience, that it's it's very it's not a
good idea to try to lift it by yourself. I
did try that one time, I and spent the next
week flat on my back in bed with a herniated disc.
It's it's such a large, bulky work and and weighing
over sixty pounds that it's something that it has to
be lifted by two people. And in fact, it takes
(22:12):
two people generally to turn the pages, because otherwise you
run the risk of the pages beginning to tear or
rip down at the binding if you if you don't
turn them in a very controlled, careful manner. The books, though,
are generally because of their size, are generally stored flat um,
and most libraries then as now would generally store the
books flat um. Storing them in an upright manners puts
(22:37):
a lot of stress on the binding, because that's the
sown binding is carrying a lot of weight. So you
want to to relieve the binding of that sort of stress,
so you would store it flat. So we started this
series on Audubon by talking about the founding of the
Audubon Society by George Bird Grinnell. Grinnell did have a
connection to Audubon. He had studied with Lucy in her widowhood.
(22:57):
But to some folks, the connection between a conservation society
and a famous bird hunter might seem surprising, so it's
important to remember that while Audubon noted and celebrated the
seemingly endless bounty of birds in America, one of his
famous journal entries in fact described seeing the sky black
with passenger pigeons like an eclipse. He also noted later
(23:20):
in his career how things seemed less bountiful, how robbing
nests of eggs was unsustainable, and how mass shootings were happening,
and some of the birds he painted are now extinct,
including the passenger pigeon. Yeah, and in our interview, Michael
Edman suggested that it was Audubon's passion for birds and
their habitat that made him the figurehead he is in
(23:41):
the Natural World and the PBS documentary we talked about
on Audubon suggested that it was that early recognition of
loss that made him a conservation figure and realizing before
many people did, what was really happening and how this
just wasn't gonna last. But I can also see how
Audubon's beautiful drawings served as a great example of what
(24:02):
was worth saving and could have helped impress upon, say,
the Boston blue Bloods who we were mentioning in the
earlier episode, who weren't going to see egrets in the
everglades of live birds, it would help impress upon them
that the birds themselves were really more beautiful than than
their feathers and then than the hats that were made
from their feathers, especially since his paintings were so different
(24:25):
than anything else that was around during his time. I mean,
some of the paintings of the birds, they really do
seem to have a personality, like a kind of life
to them. But we had one last question of Michael
Inman that we wanted to ask. Out of the four
thirty five plates and the one eight nine species and
the one thousand and sixty five birds depicted in Birds
(24:46):
of America, we wanted to know which was his favorite.
And it's very difficult to pick out one that is
my absolute favorite. Um Usually it's the you know, I
turned the page and that one I'm looking at as
you know, my my favorite. If I had to pick, though,
I would say plate number twenty six, which is the
Carolina parakeet. Uh, in part because it is one of
(25:09):
those birds that's now extinct. And an Audubon captured the
bird in such a wonderful manner. UM. There are multiple
Carolina parakeets in the image, UM, six or seven at least,
as I recall, and they're depicted in this vibrant green
it was a bright green parakeet. And it's it's just
a stunning, stunning image. Uh. It's it's so dynamic. There's
(25:33):
so much action taking place in that image, and the
birds are are are moving in certain cases, are looking
directly at you. UM. You really get a sense that
you're wandering through a thicket or some or someplace a
swamp in the Carolinas, and suddenly you move a tree
branch and there they are, just right in front of you.
It's a really stunning image, and it's very colorful and alive.
(25:56):
And I think the overall, UM, that would be my
favor for it UM. But again it's hard. Some some
of my other favorite ones are for lesser known species.
Some of my favorite images are for birds that are UM.
Some of the small illustrations. The Carolina parakeet is one
of those images that's a full page UM. But some
of the ones that are smaller images that are more
(26:17):
delicate in nature Um, those are some of my favorites too,
because the more you look at them, the more you see, uh,
you know, a spider dangling on a web that's almost imperceptible,
or um, you know the details of the foliage, the
flowers in the background. There's there's so much there to see,
and every time you look at Audubon's work, you see
something new that you've you've never noticed before. And to
(26:40):
my mind, that's one of the great achievements and hallmarks
of Audubon's Birds of America is that you are always
seeing something more every time you look at it. So
it's tough for Michael to pick his favorite bird, and
it was for us too. We actually didn't pick one,
but we wanted to invite all of the listeners to
email us and let us know what maybe your favorite
(27:02):
bird and Birds of America is, And we'd like to
know as well. Is it because you just like the
bird or exactly or because you actually appreciate the illustration
and and that made you change your opinion of it
for some reason or another. So right to us. We're
at History Podcast Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook,
(27:23):
and we're on Twitter at mist in History and We
do have an article on the Audubon Society. That society
named for this famous illustrator. It's called How the Autumn
Society Works, and you can find out a little bit
more about the plum hunting too, and some of the
crazy later history of the Audubon Society. Um the plume
hunters took the mission pretty seriously. Let's just say that
(27:46):
sometimes stoop into murder. So if you want to check
that out, search for the Audubon Society on our website
at www dot how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
Stuff Works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fairy Daddy and I'm doubling in chark Reboarding, and
we're picking off where we left off on illustrator and
naturalist John James Audubon. And in the last episode we
(00:23):
covered Audubon's illegitimate birth to a French ship's captain and
his mistress in what is now Haiti right before the
Haitian Revolution, and after making it through the French Revolution
as well, John James was finally moved by his father
to Pennsylvania in order to avoid conscription in Napoleon's army.
(00:43):
And it's at that point that Audubon really became kind
of an early American renaissance man, someone who is equally
at home dancing, fencing and dressing and fine clothes, lying
in brush for hours, watching and sketching birds, or studying
up on ornithology in the natural world. But it wasn't
until eighteen nineteen, after he had lost his business in
(01:04):
the Panic, that Audubon began focusing in earnest on a
monumental project, and that was illustrating all of the birds
in all of America will include portions of an interview
as we mentioned before with Michael Ennan in this episode.
He's the curator of the Rare Books division at the
New York Public Library, who, in addition to being a
(01:24):
big Audubon buff himself, shared lots of interesting information with
us about the book. So by eighteen twenty four where
we left off, after years of sketching birds and traveling
around the country looking for new species, John James Audubon
was finally ready to find a publisher, and so his
wife and two sons had set up their home base
(01:45):
near New Orleans, where the boys could be educated and
Lucy could teach deportment and piano to the children of
wealthy planters there. But Audubon decided that Philadelphia, which was
still at that time the intellectual and cultural capital of
the United States, would be the best place for him
to drum up some interest in this project of his.
(02:06):
It's important to remember that as beautiful as Audubon's drawing
still are today, they must have seemed completely novel and
breathtaking at the time, maybe even shocking to some people.
When Audubon presented his portfolio to Charles Lucienne, Bonaparte, who
was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences and
Napoleon's nephew. Bonaparte was just blown away by them, and
(02:28):
he started parading Audubon around town to meet artists and scientists.
And Audubon had this kind of rugged, brash way about him.
He'd really cultivated that frontiersman image that we talked about
in the first part of this podcast. So he probably
surprised a lot of people that he met. But his
big mistake was starting to criticize American ornithology and specifically
(02:50):
the late Alexander Wilson and his works, who Michael Nman
mentioned Wilson a little bit in the last podcast. Yeah,
and according to William Fowder in American History, Wilson's earlier
incomplete attempt to illustrate the birds of American you know,
this was something he had tried before Audubon was trying.
His attempt at doing that was something that the folks
in Philadelphia were really very proud of, and they considered
(03:12):
Wilson to be the father of American ornithology, and they
considered his book as one of America's first great scientific works,
plus just a really nice book. So here comes Backwoods,
Audubon out of nowhere, criticizing Wilson, talking about mistakes and
Wilson's drawings, and even accusing him of kind of a
type of bird hunting plagiarism. He said that when they
(03:34):
met back in Kentucky, he helped Wilson bag a type
of warbler that he was searching for and didn't get
any credit for that. So instead of finding a publisher
in Philadelphia with all of this talk, Audubon found himself
shut out instead, shut out of society. Michael Inman actually
described it to us as him being quote roundly snubbed,
But it became clear to him that Europe was just
(03:58):
going to be the better place to go. There would
if you were a Wilfon fans there, so he was
less likely to offend people. There would be more people
with deep book buying pockets, and most importantly, there wouldn't
be real life North American birds to just look out
in your backyard, so you might be more inclined to
buy this very expensive work he was planning. So Audubon
(04:19):
set off for Liverpool in eighty six with letters of
introduction and his portfolio in tow and according to Richard
Rhodes and Smithsonian Magazine. One of these letters of introduction
was to Lucy's sister Anne, who married an englishman. He
was so rugged looking though he knocked at the door,
and he was actually asked not to call against It
(04:41):
seemed like a pretty unpromising start if your own sister
in law turns you away, But that actually wasn't the case.
Even though his in laws didn't receive them with open arms,
Audubon's non in law connections proved to be a lot
more promising that Those same qualities that made him unpopular
in Philadelphia made him huge hit in Great Britain. And
(05:01):
Michael told us a little bit more about Auto Vonn's
reception abroad. Almost immediately he became sort of the toast
of English society that season. He was sort of celebrated
as this rugged American woodsman, and he did a great
deal to try to perpetuate that sort of romantic image.
His hair was long and flowing. He sort of looked
(05:21):
something probably like Daniel Boone to them, and in fact
that the English at that time were very enamored of
that romantic ideal of Daniel Boone or of um, you know,
these sorts of uh, images that would come out of
the novel of James Fenimore Cooper, for example, that sort
of frontiersman image. And so he played upon that and
traded upon it, and he set upon or set about
(05:45):
showing his images, his drawings and sketches to uh the
leading minds of England at that time, and was embraced.
Um he they were again they were shocked because it
was unlike anything they had seen. But it wasn't He
didn't encounter that sort of snobbishness. I think that he
had encountered in in Philadelphia and throughout the United States,
(06:07):
and that probably had something to do with the United
States then being a still fairly new country and perhaps
a little bit insecure about its place in the world.
In In in England, they were of course far more
been around a very long time, and so they were
perhaps a little bit more receptive um two new ideas
or ways of depicting the world. So with that, Daniel
(06:29):
Boone left of the Mohicans kind of persona to recommend him.
Audubon started renting out halls for art shows, started spicing
up his lectures by providing entertainment himself. He'd talk about
what he had seen in his travels to to draw
all these birds. He had lecture in his buckskin costume
with his hair greased back with bear fat and just
(06:52):
talk about frontier life. He would even imitate birds, he
would imitate war calls. He must have been quite a
one man oh for for these audiences. Yeah, I guess
these audiences had sort of romanticized this version of America
that he was representing to them. But in Edinburgh he
also connected with engraver William Lazars, who, despite having several
(07:14):
other large projects underway, agreed to take on this really
massive task of printing Birds of America. And this would
include it would be an ongoing process as they planned it,
with Audubon painting and adding new birds and Lazar's engraving them.
And Michael told us how Lazar's would have gone about
engraving the first few drawings and how the book was
planned to be released bit by bit. Here's what he
(07:37):
had to say. The basic process of completing the the engravings,
uh was that the someone in the printing shop would
trace using tracing paper essentially would trace the watercolor, getting
the general outlines, and then that that tracing paper would
then be transferred to the copper plate, and that would
(08:00):
be done by basically taking the the transfer paper which
had the lead image on it, and it would be
rubbed essentially onto the plate. The plate itself would have
a wax ground across it, which would pick up enough
of the the traced image that then someone could then
(08:22):
take a burain, which is essentially like a needle, and
then trace those lines on the copper plate, scooping out
that wax ground only where the lines appear. The plate
is then put into an acid bath, and depending on
how long the plate is left in the acid bath,
that will affect how how deeply the acid eats into
(08:43):
the plate. And the deeper the the the acid eats
into the plate, the darker the line or the broader
the line. So it allows you to achieve a darker
image and also vary the width of the line. And
it's something that skilled engraver or someone who's used to
working with the medium of etching can do in a
very controlled manner, and that was something that Lazar's or
(09:06):
the people in his printing shop could do. So Audubon's
plan for printing Birds of America was fairly straightforward in
the sense that it was done through subscription, which was
not uncommon at that time. That was something that was
common in the book trade, especially for larger works that
promised to be published over a period of years. Uh
(09:27):
and Audubon projected at the outset that it would take
him about fourteen years to finally finished printing Birds of America,
and his plan was that he would publish the work
by subscription serially, that there would be five numbers or
or sort of packets of images that would be issued
(09:49):
per year, with five individual plates per number. There would
be one large full size image typically within those that
collection of five plates, one medium size image, and then
the last three plates would be smaller birds depicted. So
you have one very large, stunning image typically and then
several smaller images within each packet. The price he estimated
(10:14):
for each UH number was about a hundred and forty pounds,
which would come out to about in today's money, about
eleven thousand pounds for the complete printing run that was
the projection, or about fifty dollars in seven money um.
That would be roughly I believe about nine hundred thousand
dollars in today's money, So it promised to be a
very large undertaking. Both from a financial standpoint and also
(10:38):
from a printing standpoint as well. So Lazar's released about
ten engravings before word got back to Audubon that Lazar's
color as had gone strikes. So these were the people
who would hand color every single print, and this, of
course threatened to draw out what was already going to
be a lengthy printing process. Plus, Audubon hadn't been a
(10:59):
hundred since satisfied with what he had seen the work
he had seen from Lazars, and he was worried too
that Lazars was working on so many projects and wouldn't
be able to dedicate himself fully to this one massive project.
So Michael told us a little bit about what happened
after Audubon got this news. Here's what he had to say.
Audubon saw very quickly that he needed to find another
(11:22):
publisher for Birds of America, and he just almost through happenstance.
He had a letter of introduction to a man in London,
one of the leading printers and publishers in London, a
man named Robert Hovel, and he went to see Hovel
and inquired about the possibility of Hovel taking the project over.
(11:43):
Hovel was again very much in favor of doing it,
because it was such a monumental undertaking. However, he said,
you know, I'm so far advanced in age. You know
this is promising to take fourteen or so years to do.
He said, what I'll agree to do is this, I'll
take over the project. I'll oversee the engravers. I can't
do it myself, but I'll find someone who can engrave
(12:05):
the images up to your standards, and I'll oversee them
and we can continue with the publishing of Birds of
America here in London. So Hovel set about finding and
an engraver um for Birds of America, and he asked
several colleagues, and one of the colleagues said, oh, yes,
I know a young man who can do a great job,
and brought a sample of this person's work, and have
(12:28):
all said, oh, this is fantastic quality work. You know,
this is exactly what I'm looking for. He said, who
is this person? He said, well, if you like the work,
I think you'll like the person. It's your son, Robert
Hovel Jr. Umvelt Robert Hovel Jr. And his father had
done somewhat estranged for a period of years and hadn't
really been in contact too much, but they were able
(12:48):
to reconcile very quickly with the prospect of taking on
this monumental project. Robert Hovel Jr. Came back into the fold,
began working in his father's shop, and uh Audubon asked
Lazars to send the first ten copper plates to Robert Hovel,
which they retouched and reworked and brought up to the
current standard, and they began moving forward from that point on.
(13:12):
So this partnership with Havel and his son proved especially
lucky for Audubon since Havevel was a master of something
called aquitint, an engraving technique that allowed for a tone gradation.
And from a practical side, what this meant was that
the colorless hand coloring all of those prints didn't have
to achieve shading with their paint. They could do a
flat wash. But it also meant a beautiful and product. Michael,
(13:37):
who of course works with the book at the New
York Public Library, said that aquitint really adds depth and
difference between the first ten plates and the later ones
um and that difference is really clear when you look
at them side by side. Okay, so at this point,
the hovels were publishing the completed drawings, and Audubon with
heading back to America every now and then to keep
(13:59):
on local eating and keep on painting new birds to
add to the collection. But he was also writing his
Ornithological Biography, which was kind of an index to go
with the printed book, So an index of all the
species mentioned, complete with tall tales and notes on how
the birds tasted, retention that in the last episode, and
(14:19):
wilderness stories to some of which she just completely made up.
But Audubon's work in Europe and American cities wasn't over either,
because he still had to constantly raise subscriptions and maintain
the orders of his clients, so there was a business
side as well as the artistic side to it. Subscription, though,
did offer some advantages for him, even though it required
(14:41):
this constant maintenance. It did it provided a steady income
stream for a project that ended up costing about nine
hundred thousand dollars in modern currency, and it also allowed
Audubon to get around laws requiring donations of complete sets
to British Library, which would have been a huge loss right,
but subscriptions costing about one thousand, fifty dollars at the
(15:04):
time for a complete set. Only the very rich could
afford these books. Michael told us Some of the subscribers
included George the fourth of England, Charles the tenth of France,
whose subscription actually got interrupted when he was deposed. The
British Museum was another subscriber, the Library of Congress, Daniel Webster,
and John Jacob Astor. According to Audubon's notes, there were
(15:26):
eventually one hundred and sixty one subscribers, though interestingly some
didn't make it through the entire run. As Michael explains
to us here there were there was a financial panic,
a depression in eighteen thirty six, for example, and uh,
that most likely put a dent in the subscription. When
you're forced with deciding if you want to pay for
(15:46):
your your your land, or your home or a book
about birds, probably the book about birds is the first
thing to go. So that was kind of a funny
and to this whole subscription story. But you can imagine
that with Audubon keeping subscribers interested in overseeing the printing
and sketching birds still too, he didn't really have that
(16:07):
much time to spend it home with his family in
New Orleans, and especially during the first few years when
he was really still getting the project off the ground
and still really the toast of the town to doing
those lectures in his buckskins. And it's during this time
that he and his wife had a misunderstanding of miscommunication.
And he had been abroad for about two years and
(16:27):
he was getting lonely. He wrote to Lucy and asked
her to join him in Europe, but somehow or another,
their letters got crossed in the mail and he came
away with the impression that she would only leave Louisiana
when he was finally rich. Well, she thought he just
wasn't interested in her anymore. He was famous now, the
(16:48):
toast of the town, like we said, and just didn't
want his wife hanging around. So finally, according to Rhodes,
Lucy basically wrote, come home. We need to talk, We
need to figure this out, And so Audubon started this
epic trip home. Yeah, he arrived in by U. Sarah
in the middle of the night in November, and he
(17:09):
later wrote about wandering through St. Francisville looking for a
horse to ride the fifteen miles to Lucy school, but
he only found the house is emptied by yellow fever.
Finally he got a horse and he rode through the
night and got to Lucy school at six am, but
he found her already teaching piano. Here's how he described
the scene. I pronounced her name gently, she saw me,
(17:32):
and the next moment I held her in my arms.
Her emotion was so great I feared I had acted rashly.
But tears relieved our hearts. Once more we were together.
So this is why we think audubon story needs to
be a movie, This grand romantic scene. And Lucy and
Audubon basically didn't separate after that, and as their sons
(17:52):
grew up, they joined the family business of producing Birds
of America, something that went on for a very long time,
not wait as long as Audubon expected, but finally completed
publication in eighteen thirty nine after twelve years. So at
this point Audubon was fifty three years old. Birds of
America had been his lifelong project. And Michael Edman told
(18:15):
us a little bit about what somebody like this was
going to do next, and here's what he had to say. Audubon,
uh did not really make any money at all on
the initial publication of Birds on the double elephant folio
volume um and that term referring simply to the size
of the paper that was used, which was the largest
commercially available sized paper that was available at that time.
(18:39):
He made virtually no money on that, and so he
immediately in eighteen thirty nine, as publication well in too
to a close, he began looking for ways to recoup
some of his investment and almost immediately began working on
a smaller version of Birds of America, what was known
(18:59):
as the Royal Octabo version, which is a much smaller
format book format uh and he began printing or having
that published within a matter of a few years. They
began publishing this Royal Octavo format, and because number one,
it was smaller, and also they used a different printing process.
(19:20):
Instead of using etching and engraving and aquatint, they used lithography,
which was much easier to a format a meeting that's
much easier easier to work with. They were able to
publish it much more cheaply, and he made a good
deal of money off of the Royal Octabo version, in
fact enough that he was able to secure his financial
(19:42):
future for pretty much the remainder of his life. It
made um a very large chunk of money for him,
so the family ended up moving to this nice house
in New York, and the unstoppable, audible, and or seemingly
unstoppable also started planning a work on the mammals of America.
So he spent three years on that work that he
(20:04):
was aging rapidly. His eyesight started to fail and he
became senile, and he finally died in eighteen fifty one.
His last lucid words were to invite his visiting brother
in law to go hunting with him. Lucy lived for
many more years after that, eventually running out of money,
though first she sold off the water colors and then
the copper plates to try to support herself, and according
(20:26):
to Souder's article, Audubon had had these sent home after
printing was completed, but the ships sank in the New
York Harbor that destroyed many of the plates, and the
others were damaged in at five warehouse fire. The remaining
plates Lucy sold were being melted down for scrap metal
when the plant manager's son realized what they were and
save the ones that he could. He basically just salvaged
(20:49):
whatever was left. In two thousand two, the Audubon State
Park Museum in Kentucky actually struck prints from one of them,
so they still work. They still work, and today too.
I mean, we've got to talk about the remaining copies
of the book. To those one thousand fifty dollar double
elephant copies of Birds of America go for about eight
million dollars, meaning that most of the one d and
(21:11):
twenty known complete sets are held by museums and universities
and libraries. And I guess we can assume a small
number of very wealthy people. But it really makes sense
from a physical standpoint as well as a financial one,
that these books are held in institutions, considering that they
are very large books once that would be quite difficult
(21:32):
to display in a private home, even a well appointed
private home. I would say they measure thirty nine and
a half inches by twenty nine and a half inches.
And Michael told us a little bit about what a
book of that size is like and how you have
to deal with it, and here's what he had to say.
And each volume weighs over sixty pounds. And I know this,
(21:52):
uh from experience, that it's it's very it's not a
good idea to try to lift it by yourself. I
did try that one time, I and spent the next
week flat on my back in bed with a herniated disc.
It's it's such a large, bulky work and and weighing
over sixty pounds that it's something that it has to
be lifted by two people. And in fact, it takes
(22:12):
two people generally to turn the pages, because otherwise you
run the risk of the pages beginning to tear or
rip down at the binding if you if you don't
turn them in a very controlled, careful manner. The books, though,
are generally because of their size, are generally stored flat um,
and most libraries then as now would generally store the
books flat um. Storing them in an upright manners puts
(22:37):
a lot of stress on the binding, because that's the
sown binding is carrying a lot of weight. So you
want to to relieve the binding of that sort of stress,
so you would store it flat. So we started this
series on Audubon by talking about the founding of the
Audubon Society by George Bird Grinnell. Grinnell did have a
connection to Audubon. He had studied with Lucy in her widowhood.
(22:57):
But to some folks, the connection between a conservation society
and a famous bird hunter might seem surprising, so it's
important to remember that while Audubon noted and celebrated the
seemingly endless bounty of birds in America, one of his
famous journal entries in fact described seeing the sky black
with passenger pigeons like an eclipse. He also noted later
(23:20):
in his career how things seemed less bountiful, how robbing
nests of eggs was unsustainable, and how mass shootings were happening,
and some of the birds he painted are now extinct,
including the passenger pigeon. Yeah, and in our interview, Michael
Edman suggested that it was Audubon's passion for birds and
their habitat that made him the figurehead he is in
(23:41):
the Natural World and the PBS documentary we talked about
on Audubon suggested that it was that early recognition of
loss that made him a conservation figure and realizing before
many people did, what was really happening and how this
just wasn't gonna last. But I can also see how
Audubon's beautiful drawings served as a great example of what
(24:02):
was worth saving and could have helped impress upon, say,
the Boston blue Bloods who we were mentioning in the
earlier episode, who weren't going to see egrets in the
everglades of live birds, it would help impress upon them
that the birds themselves were really more beautiful than than
their feathers and then than the hats that were made
from their feathers, especially since his paintings were so different
(24:25):
than anything else that was around during his time. I mean,
some of the paintings of the birds, they really do
seem to have a personality, like a kind of life
to them. But we had one last question of Michael
Inman that we wanted to ask. Out of the four
thirty five plates and the one eight nine species and
the one thousand and sixty five birds depicted in Birds
(24:46):
of America, we wanted to know which was his favorite.
And it's very difficult to pick out one that is
my absolute favorite. Um Usually it's the you know, I
turned the page and that one I'm looking at as
you know, my my favorite. If I had to pick, though,
I would say plate number twenty six, which is the
Carolina parakeet. Uh, in part because it is one of
(25:09):
those birds that's now extinct. And an Audubon captured the
bird in such a wonderful manner. UM. There are multiple
Carolina parakeets in the image, UM, six or seven at least,
as I recall, and they're depicted in this vibrant green
it was a bright green parakeet. And it's it's just
a stunning, stunning image. Uh. It's it's so dynamic. There's
(25:33):
so much action taking place in that image, and the
birds are are are moving in certain cases, are looking
directly at you. UM. You really get a sense that
you're wandering through a thicket or some or someplace a
swamp in the Carolinas, and suddenly you move a tree
branch and there they are, just right in front of you.
It's a really stunning image, and it's very colorful and alive.
(25:56):
And I think the overall, UM, that would be my
favor for it UM. But again it's hard. Some some
of my other favorite ones are for lesser known species.
Some of my favorite images are for birds that are UM.
Some of the small illustrations. The Carolina parakeet is one
of those images that's a full page UM. But some
of the ones that are smaller images that are more
(26:17):
delicate in nature Um, those are some of my favorites too,
because the more you look at them, the more you see, uh,
you know, a spider dangling on a web that's almost imperceptible,
or um, you know the details of the foliage, the
flowers in the background. There's there's so much there to see,
and every time you look at Audubon's work, you see
something new that you've you've never noticed before. And to
(26:40):
my mind, that's one of the great achievements and hallmarks
of Audubon's Birds of America is that you are always
seeing something more every time you look at it. So
it's tough for Michael to pick his favorite bird, and
it was for us too. We actually didn't pick one,
but we wanted to invite all of the listeners to
email us and let us know what maybe your favorite
(27:02):
bird and Birds of America is, And we'd like to
know as well. Is it because you just like the
bird or exactly or because you actually appreciate the illustration
and and that made you change your opinion of it
for some reason or another. So right to us. We're
at History Podcast Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook,
(27:23):
and we're on Twitter at mist in History and We
do have an article on the Audubon Society. That society
named for this famous illustrator. It's called How the Autumn
Society Works, and you can find out a little bit
more about the plum hunting too, and some of the
crazy later history of the Audubon Society. Um the plume
hunters took the mission pretty seriously. Let's just say that
(27:46):
sometimes stoop into murder. So if you want to check
that out, search for the Audubon Society on our website
at www dot how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
Stuff Works dot com. M
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