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In October 1830, John James Audubon wrote in his journal.
As I awoke in the morning and continued the whole day long,
"So full was my mind of birds and their habits,
that in my sleep I continually dreamed of birds."
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John Wilmerding, Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Art.
John James Audubon is doubtless the most admired and popular artist of American birds.
The major work of his life was the double elephant folio of colored engravings
produced between 1826 and 1839.
Only two complete unbound sets exist today.
One is in the Darwin Museum in Moscow,
and the other is here in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
435 plates comprise Audubon's famous publication, "The Birds of America."
Each plate reproduced an original watercolor painting
and was a hand-colored impression from a copper engraving.
Audubon's birds, seen collectively, show an extraordinary range of types
and even personalities.
His impulse is to record and categorize all the species of American birds,
and that reflects an intellectual attitude prevalent throughout much of the early 19th century,
one that linked art with science.
In aesthetic terms, Audubon's work has the clarity and balance of neoclassicism,
but for scientific purposes, his representations were often considered too dramatic.
This mockingbird drawing was criticized because the rattlesnake was thought neither to climb trees
nor to have such fangs.
But Audubon's veracity prevailed.
His art was true both to itself and to his observations of nature.
Today, in Upper Manhattan, on land that Audubon once owned, now Trinity Cemetery,
a monument marks his grave site.
To the artistic, literary, and scientific worlds, he left a unique legacy and an imperishable name.
Audubon's greatness as an artist was based on a deep feeling for nature which developed early in his childhood.
His father, a French sea captain, owned property at Mill Grove near Philadelphia.
At the age of 18, Audubon came to America from France to avoid conscription into Napoleon's army
and to manage his father's business interests.
Mill Grove today is a museum and nature center,
working the place where Audubon initiated the first bird-banding experiments,
and where he developed his method of using wires to hold birds in lifelike positions for his drawings.
In 1808, Audubon married Lucy Bakewell, daughter of William Bakewell, a neighboring landowner.
The Bakewells had come to America from England at the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
At the turn of the 19th century, America held the promise of limitless opportunity.
Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana purchase made Westwood expansion a national policy.
Audubon, with Ferdinand Rosier, a business partner, thought he could improve his fortune by joining the Westwood movement.
Audubon wrote about these early days in America in journals which he kept throughout his life.
After my marriage, he said, Lucy Rosier and I set out together.
At Pittsburgh, we gained access to the Ohio River,
where in the company of several other young families, we floated down to Kentucky.
We opened a large store at Louisville, which went on prosperously when I attended to it.
But then, as now, my thoughts were ever and anon turning toward birds.
I shot, I drew, I looked on nature only.
Beyond this, I really cared not.
From 1809 to 1819, the years Audubon spent as a storekeeper in Louisville,
and then later in Henderson, Kentucky, his drawing continued to improve.
There was better rendering of detail, and the three-dimensional quality of his birds was greatly enhanced.
From the start, Audubon's drawings displayed a marked preference for the profiles and silhouettes of forms,
a strongly linear style, reflecting conventional scientific renderings of the time.
Audubon's Fishhawk, or Osprey, probably drawn at Mill Grove,
suggests that it was done after Audubon had devised his method of wiring dead birds.
This method allowed him to arrange his subjects in animated poses, according to their habits as he had observed them.
Up to 1819, Audubon's compositions contained very sparse backgrounds,
usually only a tree branch and thinly painted leaves.
After two years, the store in Louisville was failing.
The partners decided to move further down the Ohio River to Henderson, Kentucky.
Audubon's first son, Victor, had been born in Louisville and another John Woodhouse in Henderson.
In the years following the War of 1812, life in the towns along the Ohio River reflected the benefits of a booming economy,
and families enjoyed the comforts of improved conditions.
For nine years, Audubon continued in business, and for a time had a relatively prosperous life.
He invested in the construction of a steam-powered grist mill.
By 1817, however, the economic situation had deteriorated.
The mill drained Audubon's capital, forcing him into bankruptcy.
Audubon's despair was such that even the delight of birds could not brighten his spirits.
As he wrote in his journal years later,
Henderson and all the world around assailed me with its invective.
The once wealthy man was now nothing.
I parted with every particle of property.
Nothing was left to me but my humble talents.
He went to Louisville where he began doing black chalk portraits, and within a few weeks he wrote,
"I had as much work as I could wish."
Several of Audubon's portraits done in Kentucky between September 1819 and February 1820 still exist today.
The first, like those of his early bird drawings, are rather stiffly drawn profiles.
But during this period of financial desperation, he summoned the most of his talents and his ability to draw rapidly improved.
Portraits continued to be a source of income for him until 1839 when he completed the Birds of America.
Portrait painting was a staple for American artists throughout the early 19th century.
Like other itinerant painters, Audubon traveled from house to house to carry out his commissions.
In the spring of 1820, Audubon made his way to Cincinnati with the offer of a job at the Western Museum.
Cincinnati was a flourishing economic center, and the largest city west of the Alleganies.
Housed in the elegantly designed Cincinnati College, the Western Museum provided Audubon with an opportunity to exhibit his bird drawings.
Here he received the first public recognition for his skill as a draftsman.
Audubon had been hired to help prepare displays and to work as a taxidermist.
America's first museums, although focused upon the natural sciences, included many other academic interests.
Drawing was considered one of the most useful of all the fine arts, and for several months Audubon gave lessons in misdeeds school for the ladies of Cincinnati.
From this time until 1826, the artist relied upon teaching and drawing portraits to support his family.
But he never neglected drawing birds.
Audubon had gone to Cincinnati as a failed businessman.
There he took stock of himself, and gradually came to an inner realization and firm resolve.
"I concluded," he wrote in his journal, "that perhaps I could not do better than to travel and finish my collection of the birds of America."
On October 12, 1820, with his wife's good wishes, he left Cincinnati on a flatboat bound for New Orleans.
On the trip with Audubon was Joseph Mason, a boy of thirteen who had been his student in Cincinnati.
Young Mason had a talent for drawing tree limbs and leaves, and assisted Audubon in doing the backgrounds for his birds.
The journey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, over 700 miles, took three months.
Below Natchez, the artist noted the landscape gradually became lower and flatter and brighter in the country of large and wealthy plantations.
Audubon arrived in New Orleans January 7, 1821.
By this time, nearly two decades after the Louisiana Purchase, the city was one of the most colorful and prosperous in America,
bustling with speculators and adventurers, boatmen and travelers from the river, and with many artists as well.
John Wesley Jarvis and John Vanderlin, leading neoclassical painters, were there at the time, and Audubon paid them a visit.
Vanderlin's clientele were the most fashionable families of the city.
Although initially condescending toward Audubon, Vanderlin wrote a recommendation of the bird drawings, which he said were done with great truth and accuracy.
Audubon did a few portraits while in the city, but it was birds that he sought.
Late in June, he accepted a position as tutor to the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and with Joseph Mason, he left for Bayou Sarah.
Reaching St. Francisville at the mouth of the Bayou, they followed servants sent to care for their baggage.
The five miles they walked seemed short to the artist, who enjoyed the wonders of the landscape around them.
In the nineteenth century, Oakley was one of many large plantations stretching from New Orleans to Natchez.
Audubon recalled that it was a hot, sultry day when he arrived.
Mr. and Mrs. Pirri had employed him to give lessons in drawing, music, and French.
Eliza Pirri was a girl of fifteen at the time.
Audubon thought she was prideful and required too much praise on account of her vanity.
Mr. and Mrs. Pirri were generous enough, though on occasion Mrs. Pirri gave way to a bad temper.
In contrast to the spaciousness of Oakley, the artist and his assistant shared a small room below a stairway at the back of the house.
With a steady income and the modest comforts afforded him, Audubon spent his free time hunting and drawing his cherished birds.
Nature in this area was filled with surprises for him.
He thought it miraculously different in so short a space from New Orleans.
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With Mason's help in rendering plants and flowers, Audubon produced some of his most beautiful drawings.
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Any study of Audubon's work requires a visit to the New York Historical Society.
Founded in 1804, about the same time Audubon was doing his early bird drawings,
it contains today a Museum of American History with extensive collections of decorative and fine arts.
The Society owns all but two of Audubon's original watercolor drawings for the birds of America.
Here we can study the entire range of Audubon's accomplishments.
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In Louisiana, Audubon made the greatest improvement in his techniques and his compositions became more elaborate.
Audubon drew the birds first, now usually a pair of adult birds, then selected the plant or tree limb, which Mason carefully copied.
In this manner, Joseph Mason supplied habitats for more than 50 bird drawings before leaving Audubon to return home.
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In the arrangement of pairs of birds, the pictorial quality of Audubon's drawings became, at times, very dramatic.
From 1822 onward, Audubon showed a mastery of design in harmony with the neoclassical sensibilities of his time.
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The New York Historical Society purchased all the original drawings from Lucy Audubon a few years after her husband's death.
Throughout the artist's life, Lucy had unfailing faith in his talents.
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Audubon's wife joined him in Louisiana, where she established a private school at Beechwood for the Percy family and other children from plantations in West Feliciana Parish.
With her support, Audubon carried on his search for birds in the bayous along the Lower Mississippi.
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After nearly two decades of struggling on the American frontier, in the spring of 1824,
the artist was ready to return to the east with his collection of drawings.
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Throughout the 19th century, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were the centers of art and culture in America.
Here, Audubon was a stranger, but he was determined to have his work recognized in these circles.
On April 5th, he arrived in Philadelphia, and a friend, known years earlier, introduced him to the leading artists and scientific men of the city.
Audubon met Thomas Sully, who approved of his drawings and gave him encouragement.
Others, however, were severely critical.
George Ord, who had a personal interest in publishing the work of the late Alexander Wilson, an eminent ornithologist, became an implacable adversary and the source of extreme opposition to Audubon.
Without hope of obtaining a publisher, he left the city, uncertain about his future.
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For the next 14 months, Audubon traveled in the east.
He went to New York, then to Albany, and to Niagara Falls.
He thought about doing landscapes, but conceded his limitations as a painter on that scale.
At 39, Audubon was essentially a self-taught artist and naturalist.
In the scientific community, he had no credentials.
Yet he was determined to show the world the birds of his beloved America as he had depicted them, in natural attitudes in their native habitats.
Back in Louisiana and reunited with his wife, he relied again on teaching to raise money.
He gave lessons in drawing and French, and organized a dancing class for couples from the plantations near Beachwood.
With Lucy's savings and the money he had raised, he booked passage on a cotton schooner and left for England.
Audubon arrived in Liverpool Harbor on July 21, 1826.
He carried a letter of introduction to William Rathbone, who support aided the artist in gaining acceptance and recognition.
An exhibition of his drawings at the Royal Institution opened on the 1st of August.
That day, over 400 persons saw his paintings.
As Audubon's reputation grew, he was invited to join the Vernarian Society at the University of Edinburgh.
While in the city, he met William H. Lazars, an eminent engraver.
Lazars agreed to begin work on Audubon's book, "The Birds of America."
Audubon's magnetic personality was enhanced by the exotic frontier attire that he continued to wear while in England,
partly as an attraction to gain subscribers for his publication.
With the engravings in process, the task of raising money to pay Lazars required new energies.
During this period, the artist wrote hundreds of letters to carry on the business of his publication,
not forgetting his wife, to whom he sent long, detailed accounts of his progress.
At Greenbank, the home of the Rathbone family, he made a sketch of himself inscribed "Almost Happy."
The Birds of America would ultimately be bound into four volumes.
The New York Historical Society owns a complete set.
The first three volumes contain 100 prints each, and the fourth has 135.
In one of his letters to Lucy, the artist reported on the prints that had been made.
It is now a month since my work was begun by Mr. Lazars.
The paper is of unusual size, called double elephant,
and the plates are to be finished in such superb style as to eclipse all of the same kind in existence.
The first is the turkey.
This painting has been chosen to prove the necessity of the size of the work.
The smaller drawings on the large sheet have a fine effect and an air of richness that I think must ensure success.
Lazars had completed five plates when his colorist, an artisan group, engaged in hand-tinting the engravings, all went on strike.
Audubon, who was in London at the time, arranged for the work to be carried on by another engraver named Robert Havel.
Havel then continued for 11 years as Audubon's printer.
The quality of the reproductions of Audubon's original drawings deserves particular recognition.
For Havel was a gifted craftsman, continually challenged by Audubon's requirements,
and the works he produced are superb examples of the engraver's art.
From 1829 until the last plates of the birds of America were completed,
Audubon crossed the Atlantic three times in order to keep up the supply of original drawings for his engraver.
Assisting him in New Jersey and later on a trip to Florida was George Lehman, an accomplished water colorist from Philadelphia.
Lehman provided some of the most elaborate scenic backgrounds for Audubon's birds.
From 1831 on, Audubon was aided by his wife and two sons.
Lucy helped her husband with his correspondence and also wrote down his observations on American birds,
published separately as Audubon's ornithological biography.
Victor, his oldest son, supervised Havel's work, and John Woodhouse assisted in drawing backgrounds.
With the publication of the double elephant folio, Audubon's fame as America's leading artist naturalist was at last securely established.
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In his later years, the artist enjoyed both recognition and prosperity.
He purchased 30 acres on the Hudson River in Upper Manhattan, called Minney's Land, in reference to an endearing name for his wife.
Between 1840 and 1844, with his sons as partners, he published an octave audition of the Birds of America.
In 1843, Audubon made a final journey to the west, traveling by steamer to the mouth of the Yellowstone River,
where he sought the last herds of buffalo for his publication of the Quadrupeds of America.
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The western regions at mid-century embodied the continuing identification of America's destiny with its geography.
Audubon's last expedition took him to the very sites that would be the focus for a new generation of American artists.
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Science also provided them a framework for their observations.
Audubon's legacy was to have infused such observations with a sense of nature's grandeur.
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Late in his life, Audubon wrote, "As so many times before, I marvel at nature when dawn presents her in richest, purest array.
Then I am full of desire to comprehend all that I see."
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