June 18, 2012 • 20 mins
Though John James Audubon was the son of a French planter, he cultivated the image of an American frontiersman. In this episode, New York Public Library curator Michael Inman joins us for a discussion of Audubon's early life.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm very Dowdy and I'm Deblin a truck reboarding and
today we're gonna be talking about John James Audubon, who,
of course is the famous creator of Birds of America
(00:22):
in addition to being a naturalist, a great outdoorsman. And
it's easy to also believe that Audubon might have been
the founder of the Audubon Society. It's still has his name,
it's still the biggest name in bird conservation today. But
that is not the case at all. Now. Audubon had
actually been dead for more than thirty years when George
(00:43):
Bird Grinnell, the society's founder and an admirer of Audubon,
started publishing articles critiquing plume hunting in his Hunting and
Fishing magazine. And that was in the late eighteen eighties,
and a craze for those huge feathered hats known as
Gainsborough hats was decimating North American bird populations, especially shore
(01:04):
and water birds. And we talked a little bit about
games for a hots in our Real Moriarty episode and
the Portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire sort of starting
that trend again for these huge hats, but it really
was affecting water birds, shore birds um because plume hunters
were killing them for their feathers. So Grenelle's publication didn't
(01:25):
last that long, but a few years after it shut down,
a socialite name to Harriet Hevenway decided that she was
going to pick up the torch. So she and her
cousin poured through the Boston Blue Book, you know, all
the top names in Boston society, and noted down every
fashionable lady who wore these plumes, and instead of writing
(01:47):
them scathing letters like give up your plumes, the cousins
instead invited these feather wearing ladies to join the newly
formed Massachusetts Audubon Society, and by the turn of the century,
several of these state level Audubon societies banded together, still
keeping that name, and consequently Audubon's name became synonymous not
(02:07):
only with his own work Birds of America, but with
American conservation and between these two heavy legacies, though a
lot of the fascinating details and the contradictions about Audubon's
life kind of got overlooked for one thing. He was
fine living in the woods for weeks, meeting Native Americans
and fur trappers, or teaching planters sons how to dance
(02:30):
and play violin, so you know, very desperate sort of things. Yeah,
he was also a real Daniel Boot type who would
obsess about his hair, and he and his wife had
the cinematic love story, but they lived apart for years.
And while he prided himself on his very accurate drawings,
he also loved a good tall tale too. I mean
(02:51):
that sort of fits in with the Daniel boone perspectively think.
But he did have all of these different sides of
his personality going on. So over the course of two episodes,
we'll be talking about Audubon's life with input from Michael Inman,
curator of the Rare Books Division at the New York
Public Library, on Audubon's technique and the creation of Birds
of America. But first we want to kind of introduce
(03:15):
you to the contradictions, surprises, and adventure that actually started
really early on for Audubon. In fact, he wasn't even
born John James Audubon was he Prize number one. So
throughout his life Audubon would tell all sorts of stories
about his birth, really outlandish kinds of things, like he
was born in Louisiana to a French hero of the
(03:36):
American Revolution, or maybe he was even a lost heir
to the French throne. Really out there stories. But the
truth was that he had been born April seve as
Genreban to a French ship's captain and planter named John
Audubon and his French chambermaid mistress in what is today Haiti,
(03:57):
and Audubon's mother died just a few months after he
was born. I think she had never really adjusted well
to the climate there. But when the Haitian Revolution started brewing,
Audubon Senor sold off as much of his plantation land
as he could and squirreled Jean and his half sister
Rose out of the country and back to France in
(04:18):
seventeen one get them out before the revolution happened, and
to avoid complications too from Rosa's mother being mixed race,
Jehan Audubon pretended that both kids had the same French
born mother. So the sort of lies about the kid's
background started almost immediately. Once they were back home, John's
wife and welcomed the kids with open arms and raised
(04:39):
them as her own, and when the terror reached them
in seventeen and threatened their lives and their property, they
tried to secure Jean and Rosa's inheritance by officially adopting them,
So Jeanroband became Jean Jacques or Fujaire. Fujaire actually means fern,
and they chose that name to handle the revolutionary authorities,
(04:59):
who didn't like saint names didn't like the name Jean Jacques,
perhaps so. After the terror, the Audubon's relocated to a
country house, where Jean Jacque learned birds names from his
father and a family friend instructed him in taxidermy and anatomy.
He explored the marshes of Luire also, but at eighteen,
with the possibility of conscription into Napoleon's army, Jean Jacques
(05:21):
was packed off to America by his father. So Audubon Sr.
Owned this two hundred and eighty four acre farm called
Mill Grove outside of Philadelphia, where one of his tenants
had recently discovered a vein of leads. So Jean Audubon
hoped that his son might go there, check out this discovery,
and be able to manage the farm and make some
(05:41):
money on his own too, because the family's fortunes had
obviously taken a hit between the Haitian and the French revolutions.
But John James was not that great at running a
large farm. He was more interested in pretty much everything
else you could be interested in. He loved clothes, dancing, music, socializing.
He was incredibly popular with his friends and neighbors. He
(06:03):
was considered quite handsome. According to PBS. One of his
Pennsylvania neighbors wrote, quote, a handsomer man I never saw.
But he also really loved being outside too and watching birds.
And Will Bakewell, who was Audubon's future brother in law,
gave a really good picture of Audubon's natural history loving
life at this time. On entering his room, I was
(06:25):
astonished and delighted to find that it was turned into
a museum. The walls were festooned with all kinds of birds,
eggs carefully blown out and strung on a thread. The
chimney piece was covered with stuffed squirrels, raccoons, and apossums,
and the shelves around were likewise crowded with specimens, among
which were fishes, frogs, snakes, lizards, and other reptiles. Besides
(06:48):
these stuffed varieties, many paintings were arrayed on the walls,
chiefly of birds. He was an admirable marksman, an expert swimmer,
a clever writer, and was notable for the elegance of
his figure year and the beauty of his features. Besides
other accomplishments, he was musical, a good fencer, danced well
and had some acquaintance with Ledger domain tricks, worked in hair,
(07:12):
and could plait willow baskets. So multitalent. She busy working
hair to to manage the farm, but Audubon soon fell
in love with his neighbor's daughter, Lucy Bakewell, who actually
came from the Erasmus Darwin family. Um he was Charles's grandfather,
and she was a really talented lady too. She was
(07:33):
an avid rider, she read a lot, she was a pianist.
So Lucy and Audubon married and sold that farm and
moved on to Louisville, Kentucky, where Audubon opened up a
general store and really reveled in all of these hunting
and drawing opportunities that were suddenly available to him in
what was basically a frontier town at the time, pretty
(07:55):
close to a frontier town. So Audubon had been sketching
birds for years and years, but at this point his
studies really began in earnest. He wasn't a great illustrator
though yet And according to the PBS documentary on Audubon,
Drawn from Nature, he even called his flat looking birds
quote crippled. So he had some improvements to make. Yeah.
(08:16):
So the first thing we wanted to ask Michael Inman
about where these early drawings. And here's what he had
to say. His early work was, um, far more traditional. Uh.
He he initially modeled himself on several of the other
leading ornithologists of that time. In particular, Um, there was
a gentleman, an English ornithologist, Mark Catesby, who had produced
(08:39):
a book called The Natural History of the Carolinas, Florida
and the Bahama Islands. And and Catesby was probably the
first ornithologist who really focused on certainly North America, and
and Audubon was familiar with his work and the work
of others, and his early work did sort of fall
into that vein of just being rather static and traditional. Uh.
(09:00):
It was only sort of later, especially after he he
met an ornithologist named Alexander Wilson UM, who was in
the process of publishing a book called American Ornithology UH,
and Wilson he just had a chance meeting with Wilson.
Wilson was traveling selling subscriptions to his work. He met
Wilson and viewed his work and was very impressed with it.
(09:23):
But after Wilson left, a friend and colleague of Audubon
said to him, you know, your work is much much better,
UM and lifelike uh than Wilson's is. And I think
it was from that moment on that he really saw
that he had some unique gift to to really depict
birds in a lifelike manner, and he began, I think
(09:43):
from that sort of that point on, really pushing the
envelope as far as how the book birds could be depicted.
So not long after this chance meeting with Alexander Wilson, Audubon,
Lucy and their growing family relocated to the even more
remote Henderson, Kentucky to run a general store there, and
this seemed like one of the happiest periods in Audubon's life.
(10:05):
He and Lucy would swim across the Ohio River and
back from morning exercise, and she would garden and keep
an elegant home filled with her family's antiques from England,
and his business partner would run the store and Audubon
himself would stock the store and hunt for provisions. And
this is also when he honed the technique that allowed
him to recreate birds so realistically on the page. A
(10:28):
lot of bird lovers, though we'll just stay up front,
are a bit horrified when they learned that to do
this Audubon had to kill the birds that he drew.
He'd head out with a shotgun bag of bird that
he was interested in, and then immediately ready at for sketching.
And Michael told us a little more about audubon system
and doing this and how he he sketched them was
(10:49):
rather innovative for the time. He devised the system of
of wires and boards and so forth, basically a little
contraption where he could then rig the birds up in
in the lifelike poses that he had observed when he
was out in the woods or swamps or wherever he
may have been, and he would then sketch them in
(11:11):
these very lifelike dynamic poses, which is something that really
had not been done until that time. Until he began
doing that, generally, the the artists, the ornithologists who were
sketching birds or depicting birds in books up until that point,
uh tended to depict them in very sort of static
poses in profile or uh certainly not with any sort
(11:32):
of dynamic aspect or motion implied in the artwork. But
Audubon really wanted to capture that, you know, the birds
as they had appeared to him when he was observing them.
So he he did work out this system where he
could attach wires and and you know, manipulate the birds
so that even though they were dead at that time,
they still appeared very lifelike to him as he was
(11:54):
then working on his watercolors to um to depict them. Uh.
He did run up against the problem though in certain cases,
especially when he was in very hot climates such as
the lower Mississippi Valley, that some of these specimens would
begin to decompose rather quickly. So it had to be
very quick, uh, you know, go out shoot the birds,
get back to wherever it was that was his home base,
(12:15):
and very quickly draw them or paint them before they
began to sort of rot before his eyes. So it
was it was a very sort of hurried process, and
he was constantly on the move. He was very much
driven to depict these birds um as as as life
like a manner as possible. So when you look at
Audubon's images, it's easy to see how these gritted, pinned
(12:38):
and freshly dead birds offered a whole lot more over
the traditional technique of the time, which was to kill
a bird, skin it, preserve the skin with arsenic, and
then stuff it with rope, and then finally illustrate it.
But you know, Ottoman knew that not only could he
position them in more lifelike ways when they were freshly dead,
but he even knew that the color of birds feathers
(13:00):
would start to change within just twenty four hours of
its death. It's worth noting, too, though, that he didn't
waste anything. He didn't draw these birds and then just
toss them aside. According to Richard Rhodes and Smithsonian Magazine,
after he was done sketching and supposing the bird wasn't
decomposing too badly, as Michael mentioned, Audubon would then dissect
(13:22):
it and he would take very careful anatomical notes on
what he thought and then, because he was often out
in the wilderness and didn't have anything else to eat,
he would eat the bird and describe its taste in
his field journals, and these are all things that eventually
became part of his work. Officially, though, Audubon was still
(13:42):
a businessman, not an illustrator for his career. But after
the Panic of eighteen nineteen, his businesses, which at this
point included a mill also in addition to the general store,
they started to turn south. So he was desperate for cash,
and so at this point he tried to call in
alone to Samuel Bowen, but Owen wouldn't pay up, and
this started a kind of an argument between the two
(14:04):
in which Bowen attacked Audubon, hitting him several times before
Audubon stabbed Bowen and ultimately injured him. He was found
not guilty of this assault, but ended up being put
into the Louisville Jail for debt, where he declared bankruptcy
and ended up seeing all of his possessions sold off,
including Lucy's heirlooms. So you can imagine how that would
(14:26):
have been for their family. At that time. Even Audubon's
precious paintings were put up for sale, but nobody wanted them,
so he ended up getting to keep them. Actunately, he
was able to keep those, but to add to their troubles,
the bankruptcy and all of that, the Audubon's, who had
two healthy sons, lost two baby girls at this time,
and it was clearly time for a career change. At
(14:46):
this point, Audubon was not cut out to be a businessman,
and so he decided to go to work for a
museum in Cincinnati, kind of similar to the one that
we discussed in the P. T. Barnum episode, like a
curiosity museum filled with a jumble of natural history and
cultural history items. And at that museum in Cincinnati, Audubon
(15:07):
practiced his taxidermy and was really encouraged in his art.
To encouraged in this project he had started working on
sort of unwittingly, so in eighteen twenty, frustrated by not
getting regular paychecks from his museum job, but feeling pretty inspired. Nevertheless,
he and one of his drawing students, Joseph Mason, set
(15:28):
out for New Orleans and he didn't have much money. Again,
those paychecks weren't coming through, so he bartered their boat
passage in exchange for his hunting skills and made it
down to New Orleans. So Audubon had a new goal,
and that was to paint every bird in America life
size by eighty one. Lucy and the kids joined him
(15:48):
down in New Orleans and he'd paint portraits and teach
planters kids how to dance, fence or ride, and she
opened up a school of deportment and piano. His artistic
style also continue to evolve during this period. He his
paintings started to include more action, and the scenes were
more like the tableau that he helped create at the
Cincinnati Museum, which meant that they had realistic backgrounds and
(16:13):
featured natural habitats, not just a bird on a twig
essentially right. His work was mostly done in watercolor, but
he'd also outline feather edges and pencil so the pieces
would really glint like actual birds. Yeah, and all of
this drawing obviously meant more travel too. He was, after all,
trying to paint the birds of America, even though Louisiana
(16:35):
was obviously filled with birds, so that required a lot
of roaming. And we asked Michael some about how Audubon
knew what to look for and where to go, because
I think that was what fascinated me most about this project.
How would you know what you were going to do?
Here's what he had to say. Well, Audubon was something
of an autodied act. He taught himself about ornithology UM.
(16:56):
He as I said, he was familiar with the work
of There's um, the ornithologists of that time. So he
had a fairly good handle on the various species that
were then known and what their habitat was, the range
of their habitat. But he also had a very keen
eye and was able to discern new species um ones
(17:17):
that had not yet been recorded. And so he tried
to cover as much territory um literally geographically as possible.
And so he he moved from the southern swamps of
Louisiana UH, he traveled throughout the southeastern United States, Florida
to Carolina's up to um Uh, Maritime Canada, to coast
(17:41):
there Newfoundland UH and along the Ohio Valley, trying to
to capture birds in as many different geographic areas of
the country as possible, and he was very successful at that.
He identified a number of new species. On occasion he
misidentified species. Sometimes he thought he had identified a new
(18:01):
a new type of bird, when in fact um, it
was something that was already known. Um, but in many
cases he did identify new uh species of birds. So
by Audubon felt like he had enough drawings to actually
start publishing, but getting me attention his work deserve proved
a lot more difficult than he expected. So next time
(18:24):
we're going to kind of talk about that process of
starting to get his work published and the very different
receptions that he received in America and abroad, and how
that Daniel Boone persona of his that we were kind
of giggling about before really finally paid off. It proved
to be a blessing and a curse on the So um, Yeah,
(18:45):
there's a lot more to talk about Audubon, but that'll
be next time. In the meantime, if you want to
send us a note maybe about your favorite plate from
Birds of America, perhaps you could email us that history
podcast at discovery dot com and we're also on Twitter
at Myston History and we're on Facebook. And if you
(19:06):
just can't wait until part two and you want to
learn a little bit more about some of the topics
related to what we're discussing now, we have a lovely
article called how the Audubon Society Works. It was written
by our own Sarah Dowdy, and you can find it
by searching on our website, and that's at www dot
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
(19:33):
thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm very Dowdy and I'm Deblin a truck reboarding and
today we're gonna be talking about John James Audubon, who,
of course is the famous creator of Birds of America
(00:22):
in addition to being a naturalist, a great outdoorsman. And
it's easy to also believe that Audubon might have been
the founder of the Audubon Society. It's still has his name,
it's still the biggest name in bird conservation today. But
that is not the case at all. Now. Audubon had
actually been dead for more than thirty years when George
(00:43):
Bird Grinnell, the society's founder and an admirer of Audubon,
started publishing articles critiquing plume hunting in his Hunting and
Fishing magazine. And that was in the late eighteen eighties,
and a craze for those huge feathered hats known as
Gainsborough hats was decimating North American bird populations, especially shore
(01:04):
and water birds. And we talked a little bit about
games for a hots in our Real Moriarty episode and
the Portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire sort of starting
that trend again for these huge hats, but it really
was affecting water birds, shore birds um because plume hunters
were killing them for their feathers. So Grenelle's publication didn't
(01:25):
last that long, but a few years after it shut down,
a socialite name to Harriet Hevenway decided that she was
going to pick up the torch. So she and her
cousin poured through the Boston Blue Book, you know, all
the top names in Boston society, and noted down every
fashionable lady who wore these plumes, and instead of writing
(01:47):
them scathing letters like give up your plumes, the cousins
instead invited these feather wearing ladies to join the newly
formed Massachusetts Audubon Society, and by the turn of the century,
several of these state level Audubon societies banded together, still
keeping that name, and consequently Audubon's name became synonymous not
(02:07):
only with his own work Birds of America, but with
American conservation and between these two heavy legacies, though a
lot of the fascinating details and the contradictions about Audubon's
life kind of got overlooked for one thing. He was
fine living in the woods for weeks, meeting Native Americans
and fur trappers, or teaching planters sons how to dance
(02:30):
and play violin, so you know, very desperate sort of things. Yeah,
he was also a real Daniel Boot type who would
obsess about his hair, and he and his wife had
the cinematic love story, but they lived apart for years.
And while he prided himself on his very accurate drawings,
he also loved a good tall tale too. I mean
(02:51):
that sort of fits in with the Daniel boone perspectively think.
But he did have all of these different sides of
his personality going on. So over the course of two episodes,
we'll be talking about Audubon's life with input from Michael Inman,
curator of the Rare Books Division at the New York
Public Library, on Audubon's technique and the creation of Birds
of America. But first we want to kind of introduce
(03:15):
you to the contradictions, surprises, and adventure that actually started
really early on for Audubon. In fact, he wasn't even
born John James Audubon was he Prize number one. So
throughout his life Audubon would tell all sorts of stories
about his birth, really outlandish kinds of things, like he
was born in Louisiana to a French hero of the
(03:36):
American Revolution, or maybe he was even a lost heir
to the French throne. Really out there stories. But the
truth was that he had been born April seve as
Genreban to a French ship's captain and planter named John
Audubon and his French chambermaid mistress in what is today Haiti,
(03:57):
and Audubon's mother died just a few months after he
was born. I think she had never really adjusted well
to the climate there. But when the Haitian Revolution started brewing,
Audubon Senor sold off as much of his plantation land
as he could and squirreled Jean and his half sister
Rose out of the country and back to France in
(04:18):
seventeen one get them out before the revolution happened, and
to avoid complications too from Rosa's mother being mixed race,
Jehan Audubon pretended that both kids had the same French
born mother. So the sort of lies about the kid's
background started almost immediately. Once they were back home, John's
wife and welcomed the kids with open arms and raised
(04:39):
them as her own, and when the terror reached them
in seventeen and threatened their lives and their property, they
tried to secure Jean and Rosa's inheritance by officially adopting them,
So Jeanroband became Jean Jacques or Fujaire. Fujaire actually means fern,
and they chose that name to handle the revolutionary authorities,
(04:59):
who didn't like saint names didn't like the name Jean Jacques,
perhaps so. After the terror, the Audubon's relocated to a
country house, where Jean Jacque learned birds names from his
father and a family friend instructed him in taxidermy and anatomy.
He explored the marshes of Luire also, but at eighteen,
with the possibility of conscription into Napoleon's army, Jean Jacques
(05:21):
was packed off to America by his father. So Audubon Sr.
Owned this two hundred and eighty four acre farm called
Mill Grove outside of Philadelphia, where one of his tenants
had recently discovered a vein of leads. So Jean Audubon
hoped that his son might go there, check out this discovery,
and be able to manage the farm and make some
(05:41):
money on his own too, because the family's fortunes had
obviously taken a hit between the Haitian and the French revolutions.
But John James was not that great at running a
large farm. He was more interested in pretty much everything
else you could be interested in. He loved clothes, dancing, music, socializing.
He was incredibly popular with his friends and neighbors. He
(06:03):
was considered quite handsome. According to PBS. One of his
Pennsylvania neighbors wrote, quote, a handsomer man I never saw.
But he also really loved being outside too and watching birds.
And Will Bakewell, who was Audubon's future brother in law,
gave a really good picture of Audubon's natural history loving
life at this time. On entering his room, I was
(06:25):
astonished and delighted to find that it was turned into
a museum. The walls were festooned with all kinds of birds,
eggs carefully blown out and strung on a thread. The
chimney piece was covered with stuffed squirrels, raccoons, and apossums,
and the shelves around were likewise crowded with specimens, among
which were fishes, frogs, snakes, lizards, and other reptiles. Besides
(06:48):
these stuffed varieties, many paintings were arrayed on the walls,
chiefly of birds. He was an admirable marksman, an expert swimmer,
a clever writer, and was notable for the elegance of
his figure year and the beauty of his features. Besides
other accomplishments, he was musical, a good fencer, danced well
and had some acquaintance with Ledger domain tricks, worked in hair,
(07:12):
and could plait willow baskets. So multitalent. She busy working
hair to to manage the farm, but Audubon soon fell
in love with his neighbor's daughter, Lucy Bakewell, who actually
came from the Erasmus Darwin family. Um he was Charles's grandfather,
and she was a really talented lady too. She was
(07:33):
an avid rider, she read a lot, she was a pianist.
So Lucy and Audubon married and sold that farm and
moved on to Louisville, Kentucky, where Audubon opened up a
general store and really reveled in all of these hunting
and drawing opportunities that were suddenly available to him in
what was basically a frontier town at the time, pretty
(07:55):
close to a frontier town. So Audubon had been sketching
birds for years and years, but at this point his
studies really began in earnest. He wasn't a great illustrator
though yet And according to the PBS documentary on Audubon,
Drawn from Nature, he even called his flat looking birds
quote crippled. So he had some improvements to make. Yeah.
(08:16):
So the first thing we wanted to ask Michael Inman
about where these early drawings. And here's what he had
to say. His early work was, um, far more traditional. Uh.
He he initially modeled himself on several of the other
leading ornithologists of that time. In particular, Um, there was
a gentleman, an English ornithologist, Mark Catesby, who had produced
(08:39):
a book called The Natural History of the Carolinas, Florida
and the Bahama Islands. And and Catesby was probably the
first ornithologist who really focused on certainly North America, and
and Audubon was familiar with his work and the work
of others, and his early work did sort of fall
into that vein of just being rather static and traditional. Uh.
(09:00):
It was only sort of later, especially after he he
met an ornithologist named Alexander Wilson UM, who was in
the process of publishing a book called American Ornithology UH,
and Wilson he just had a chance meeting with Wilson.
Wilson was traveling selling subscriptions to his work. He met
Wilson and viewed his work and was very impressed with it.
(09:23):
But after Wilson left, a friend and colleague of Audubon
said to him, you know, your work is much much better,
UM and lifelike uh than Wilson's is. And I think
it was from that moment on that he really saw
that he had some unique gift to to really depict
birds in a lifelike manner, and he began, I think
(09:43):
from that sort of that point on, really pushing the
envelope as far as how the book birds could be depicted.
So not long after this chance meeting with Alexander Wilson, Audubon,
Lucy and their growing family relocated to the even more
remote Henderson, Kentucky to run a general store there, and
this seemed like one of the happiest periods in Audubon's life.
(10:05):
He and Lucy would swim across the Ohio River and
back from morning exercise, and she would garden and keep
an elegant home filled with her family's antiques from England,
and his business partner would run the store and Audubon
himself would stock the store and hunt for provisions. And
this is also when he honed the technique that allowed
him to recreate birds so realistically on the page. A
(10:28):
lot of bird lovers, though we'll just stay up front,
are a bit horrified when they learned that to do
this Audubon had to kill the birds that he drew.
He'd head out with a shotgun bag of bird that
he was interested in, and then immediately ready at for sketching.
And Michael told us a little more about audubon system
and doing this and how he he sketched them was
(10:49):
rather innovative for the time. He devised the system of
of wires and boards and so forth, basically a little
contraption where he could then rig the birds up in
in the lifelike poses that he had observed when he
was out in the woods or swamps or wherever he
may have been, and he would then sketch them in
(11:11):
these very lifelike dynamic poses, which is something that really
had not been done until that time. Until he began
doing that, generally, the the artists, the ornithologists who were
sketching birds or depicting birds in books up until that point,
uh tended to depict them in very sort of static
poses in profile or uh certainly not with any sort
(11:32):
of dynamic aspect or motion implied in the artwork. But
Audubon really wanted to capture that, you know, the birds
as they had appeared to him when he was observing them.
So he he did work out this system where he
could attach wires and and you know, manipulate the birds
so that even though they were dead at that time,
they still appeared very lifelike to him as he was
(11:54):
then working on his watercolors to um to depict them. Uh.
He did run up against the problem though in certain cases,
especially when he was in very hot climates such as
the lower Mississippi Valley, that some of these specimens would
begin to decompose rather quickly. So it had to be
very quick, uh, you know, go out shoot the birds,
get back to wherever it was that was his home base,
(12:15):
and very quickly draw them or paint them before they
began to sort of rot before his eyes. So it
was it was a very sort of hurried process, and
he was constantly on the move. He was very much
driven to depict these birds um as as as life
like a manner as possible. So when you look at
Audubon's images, it's easy to see how these gritted, pinned
(12:38):
and freshly dead birds offered a whole lot more over
the traditional technique of the time, which was to kill
a bird, skin it, preserve the skin with arsenic, and
then stuff it with rope, and then finally illustrate it.
But you know, Ottoman knew that not only could he
position them in more lifelike ways when they were freshly dead,
but he even knew that the color of birds feathers
(13:00):
would start to change within just twenty four hours of
its death. It's worth noting, too, though, that he didn't
waste anything. He didn't draw these birds and then just
toss them aside. According to Richard Rhodes and Smithsonian Magazine,
after he was done sketching and supposing the bird wasn't
decomposing too badly, as Michael mentioned, Audubon would then dissect
(13:22):
it and he would take very careful anatomical notes on
what he thought and then, because he was often out
in the wilderness and didn't have anything else to eat,
he would eat the bird and describe its taste in
his field journals, and these are all things that eventually
became part of his work. Officially, though, Audubon was still
(13:42):
a businessman, not an illustrator for his career. But after
the Panic of eighteen nineteen, his businesses, which at this
point included a mill also in addition to the general store,
they started to turn south. So he was desperate for cash,
and so at this point he tried to call in
alone to Samuel Bowen, but Owen wouldn't pay up, and
this started a kind of an argument between the two
(14:04):
in which Bowen attacked Audubon, hitting him several times before
Audubon stabbed Bowen and ultimately injured him. He was found
not guilty of this assault, but ended up being put
into the Louisville Jail for debt, where he declared bankruptcy
and ended up seeing all of his possessions sold off,
including Lucy's heirlooms. So you can imagine how that would
(14:26):
have been for their family. At that time. Even Audubon's
precious paintings were put up for sale, but nobody wanted them,
so he ended up getting to keep them. Actunately, he
was able to keep those, but to add to their troubles,
the bankruptcy and all of that, the Audubon's, who had
two healthy sons, lost two baby girls at this time,
and it was clearly time for a career change. At
(14:46):
this point, Audubon was not cut out to be a businessman,
and so he decided to go to work for a
museum in Cincinnati, kind of similar to the one that
we discussed in the P. T. Barnum episode, like a
curiosity museum filled with a jumble of natural history and
cultural history items. And at that museum in Cincinnati, Audubon
(15:07):
practiced his taxidermy and was really encouraged in his art.
To encouraged in this project he had started working on
sort of unwittingly, so in eighteen twenty, frustrated by not
getting regular paychecks from his museum job, but feeling pretty inspired. Nevertheless,
he and one of his drawing students, Joseph Mason, set
(15:28):
out for New Orleans and he didn't have much money. Again,
those paychecks weren't coming through, so he bartered their boat
passage in exchange for his hunting skills and made it
down to New Orleans. So Audubon had a new goal,
and that was to paint every bird in America life
size by eighty one. Lucy and the kids joined him
(15:48):
down in New Orleans and he'd paint portraits and teach
planters kids how to dance, fence or ride, and she
opened up a school of deportment and piano. His artistic
style also continue to evolve during this period. He his
paintings started to include more action, and the scenes were
more like the tableau that he helped create at the
Cincinnati Museum, which meant that they had realistic backgrounds and
(16:13):
featured natural habitats, not just a bird on a twig
essentially right. His work was mostly done in watercolor, but
he'd also outline feather edges and pencil so the pieces
would really glint like actual birds. Yeah, and all of
this drawing obviously meant more travel too. He was, after all,
trying to paint the birds of America, even though Louisiana
(16:35):
was obviously filled with birds, so that required a lot
of roaming. And we asked Michael some about how Audubon
knew what to look for and where to go, because
I think that was what fascinated me most about this project.
How would you know what you were going to do?
Here's what he had to say. Well, Audubon was something
of an autodied act. He taught himself about ornithology UM.
(16:56):
He as I said, he was familiar with the work
of There's um, the ornithologists of that time. So he
had a fairly good handle on the various species that
were then known and what their habitat was, the range
of their habitat. But he also had a very keen
eye and was able to discern new species um ones
(17:17):
that had not yet been recorded. And so he tried
to cover as much territory um literally geographically as possible.
And so he he moved from the southern swamps of
Louisiana UH, he traveled throughout the southeastern United States, Florida
to Carolina's up to um Uh, Maritime Canada, to coast
(17:41):
there Newfoundland UH and along the Ohio Valley, trying to
to capture birds in as many different geographic areas of
the country as possible, and he was very successful at that.
He identified a number of new species. On occasion he
misidentified species. Sometimes he thought he had identified a new
(18:01):
a new type of bird, when in fact um, it
was something that was already known. Um, but in many
cases he did identify new uh species of birds. So
by Audubon felt like he had enough drawings to actually
start publishing, but getting me attention his work deserve proved
a lot more difficult than he expected. So next time
(18:24):
we're going to kind of talk about that process of
starting to get his work published and the very different
receptions that he received in America and abroad, and how
that Daniel Boone persona of his that we were kind
of giggling about before really finally paid off. It proved
to be a blessing and a curse on the So um, Yeah,
(18:45):
there's a lot more to talk about Audubon, but that'll
be next time. In the meantime, if you want to
send us a note maybe about your favorite plate from
Birds of America, perhaps you could email us that history
podcast at discovery dot com and we're also on Twitter
at Myston History and we're on Facebook. And if you
(19:06):
just can't wait until part two and you want to
learn a little bit more about some of the topics
related to what we're discussing now, we have a lovely
article called how the Audubon Society Works. It was written
by our own Sarah Dowdy, and you can find it
by searching on our website, and that's at www dot
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
(19:33):
thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.
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