New biography describes Audubon's magnetism, obsession

By Mary Ann Gwinn
Seattle Times book editor

"And now the Pelicans ... press closely forward with powerful strokes of their feet, drive the little fishes toward the shallow shore, and then, with their enormous pouches spread like so many bag-nets, scoop them out and devour them in thousands." — From the journal of John James Audubon

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He was the 19th-century version of a performance artist, a buckskin-clad faux-frontiersman whose lean and hungry look set drawing-room society all atwitter.

He had a 21st-century marriage cloaked in 19th-century custom, full of passion, struggle and commitment.

He was an American entrepreneur, scrapping, scheming and fighting to pursue his artistic vision, to draw every species of bird in America, a body of work that still makes his name instantly recognizable 150 years after he lived and died.

This bundle of contradictions is John James Audubon, the wildlife artist known for "Birds of America," the magnificent compilation of paintings of single species of birds of the New World. He comes to life in a new biography by Richard Rhodes, a much-honored author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history ("The Making of the Atomic Bomb"), an inquiry into the mind of a murderer ("Why They Kill"), an expose of the commercial meat industry ("Deadly Feasts") and a chronicle of Hitler's hand-picked murderers of more than a million people between 1941 and 1943 ("Masters of Death : The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust").

"John James Audubon: The Making of an American" (Knopf, 514 pp., $30) is a departure for Rhodes, who will appear in Seattle tomorrow at the Seattle branch of the University Book Store.

Even admirers of his previous book, "Masters of Death," said the subject matter was hard to take. Rhodes agreed. "I'd just written a book about the Holocaust. I wanted to write a book about someone who was full of life. I'd had enough of death," he said from his California home in a recent phone interview.

A sense of possibility

	Ivory-billed woodpeckers by John James Audubon. This bird species is now thought to be extinct.

The spark of his interest in Audubon's life was lit three decades ago, when Rhodes visited a historic home in Florida and came upon a bound, original set of Audubon's "Birds of America" prints, the oversized, meticulously reproduced versions of Audubon's original paintings that were sold in subscriptions in the 1800s. "I was just knocked out," Rhodes recalls, stunned at their composition, drama and detail.

When he began the project a couple of years ago, Rhodes reviewed previous Audubon biographies. He came to a conclusion: "As I began to read into him, I just found him more and more likeable. I was struck that with so many of the previous biographies, they (the authors) didn't really like the man." Audubon's self-promotion skills left some biographers thinking the bird artist "too much a showman or a huckster."

Audubon, Rhodes found, was a creature of his time — the early 19th century, when Americans were blessed with an almost infinite sense of possibility. It was "an open frontier. People could go out and start over," Rhodes says. "It was a young population, leaving their families behind, leaving that old family control over the young."

	Audubon created this portrait of passenger pigeons when they numbered in the billions; through overhunting and habitat destruction, they, too, are extinct.

The young Audubon emigrated from France. The illegitimate son of a Frenchman (his mother was a French chambermaid who died of infection within months of his birth), Audubon was well-loved by his French family. His early interest in birds was fanned by a hometown mentor. But the horrors of the French revolution and the threat of the French draft spurred his family to send him to America for safety.

The young immigrant was a charmer, with large, dark eyes, an aquiline nose, chestnut hair and a lanky athletic frame, described by his adoptive mother as "the handsomest boy in Nantes, but perhaps not the most studious." Maybe not, but he was a polymath. Rhodes writes that Audubon could "sing, dance, play the flute, the violin and the recorder-like flageolet, fence, hunt, shoot and ride and draw" (occasionally teaching fencing, dancing and drawing to make ends meet). "He was volatile, excitable and vivacious. Young as he was, people already liked to be around him — men and women both."

Audubon might well have become a rake. But in rural Pennsylvania he met and fell in love with Lucy Bakewell, married her, sired two boys and appeared to remain faithful to her for life, notwithstanding his many encounters with admiring women, including a mysterious New Orleans lady who retained Audubon to draw her in the nude.

The couple's passionate letters, sometimes the only link between the two in long years of separation, were a key source of material for Rhodes. "It's rare to have the intimate correspondence he maintained with Lucy," he says. "There were even allusions to their sexual life. In a funny way they were a very modern family. Both working, both raising children, sharing so much."

A magnificent obsession

Audubon and Lucy moved to Kentucky and set up a series of businesses catering to the settlers flooding the frontier. But the Panic of 1819 and subsequent depression wiped them out. Though he had previously drawn birds fervently as an avocation, it was this setback that set Audubon on the road to his obsession — chronicling the "Birds of America."

More from the journal of John James Audubon "Everything proved to me that the number of birds resorting to this part of the forest must be immense beyond conception. ... Suddenly there burst forth a general cry of 'Here they come!' The noise which they made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea, passing through the rigging of a close-reefed vessel."

He traveled the length and breadth of the young country to gain unforgettable glimpses of his subjects, so large in number in those days as to defy the contemporary mind's ability to take in the country's former abundance. Writing of pelicans gathering to feed, Audubon marveled:

"And now the Pelicans, aware of the faculties of their scaly prey, at once spread out their broad wings, press closely forward with powerful strokes of their feet, drive the little fishes toward the shallow shore, and then, with their enormous pouches spread like so many bag-nets, scoop them out and devour them in thousands."

Audubon's prints have been so widely reproduced in so many formats, the scale and audacity of the artist's original accomplishments have been obscured. He aimed to paint every species of American bird and reproduce it in a format unheard of at the time — an "elephant" folio, each image measuring more than three feet long and two feet wide. Just the technical task of transferring his original paintings to plates for printing was daunting.

On his drawing expeditions, he endured bitter cold and wilting heat, but in the civilized jungles of Liverpool and London, he put on his most charming game face to snag wealthy patrons who would support his work. And in America, he endured the scorn of critics who thought Aubudon's breathtaking compositions destroyed the craft of bird illustration.

Alive on the page

Previous ornithological illustration was fodder for guidebooks, "so someone who wanted to look at a bird could look at the illustrations and know that the illustrations and proportions would be those of the birds in the field," Rhodes says.

Audubon shot his own specimens and arranged them for painting soon after, sometimes having the subject for dinner when he was done. He aimed for works that were "alive on the page," Rhodes says. "He had to give them foreshortening; he had to distort the image to make them look three-dimensional in flight, or twisted around a branch. In doing so he was ruining the function of the illustration, or so the scientists (of the day) thought."

But the results were compositional masterpieces. Nineteenth-century audiences were knocked out. "Imagine what it was like to walk into an exhibition hall in Liverpool with these glorious lifelike drawings, 200-300 of these pictures, (the birds) moving and feeding and flying," Rhodes says.

Audubon's drawings were also groundbreaking in their acknowledgement of violence in the natural cycle, perhaps a legacy of Audubon's exposure to the terrors of the French revolution.

"Compassion is an exclusively human gesture, though tenderness is not," Rhodes writes. Audubon ... refused to sentimentalize the scenes he drew. The golden eagle's talon piercing the northern hare's eye, or, elsewhere, the bleeding American hare urinating in pain and terror in the grip of a female red-tailed hawk itself under attack from a swooping, larcenous male, are images fully as harrowing as Goya's nightmare aquatints."

Today, Rhodes notes, the less gory Audubon compositions are worth more — an original print of a pink flamingo may fetch $200,000- $300,000, but turkey vultures feeding on a deer head go for as little as $10,000. A couple of years ago, a complete collection of the "Birds of America" sold for more than $8 million.

A bittersweet end

Audubon achieved success relatively late, in his 40s. He took his last expedition at age 58, up the Missouri River, after he had lost all his teeth. The end of his story is bittersweet: After his death, Lucy had to sell most of the original plates for scrap to make ends meet, though five or six survive (Rhodes owns a restrike from one).

Readers of Rhodes' book who love the natural world will feel bittersweet for another reason — the swiftness with which the verdant world of natural wonders Audubon chronicled has vanished.

In his journal after a visit with Sir Walter Scott, Audubon wrote this eerie prophecy:

Neither this little stream, this swamp, this grand sheet of flowing water, nor these mountains will be seen in a century hence as I see them now. Nature will have been robbed of her brilliant charms. The currents will be tormented and turned astray from their primitive courses ... Oh Walter Scott, come, come to America! See thee hence, look upon her, and see her grandeur. Nature still nurses her, cherishes her. But a tear flows in her eye. Her cheek has already changed from the peach blossom to sallow hue (and) her frame inclines to emaciation.

Rhodes suggests that contemporary readers put these words in perspective. Some bird populations in jeopardy in Audubon's time have actually rebounded.

In some areas in the Northeast after a few decades of settlement, Audubon could not find a single wild turkey. That species has reasserted its dominion (30,000 strong) in Connecticut, Rhodes' former home, and nationwide.

"The world will be a garden, though it will never be a wilderness again." Rhodes says. "He saw something we will never get to see. I treasure what he said, and most of all, painted about it."

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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