The View from Sapsucker Woods

John James Audubon. Ilustration by Isaac Sprague from the Collection of the Massachusetts Audubon Society

Among all the business failures gracing the history of our great nation, the string of collapsed ventures by the young John James Audubon may have been our greatest stroke of good luck. Ponder the vacancies that would have existed in art, science, and conservation had Audubon?s early efforts in pioneer commerce succeeded. I grew up reading about Audubon as a bumbling businessman, self-promoting dandy, and gallivanting nature-boy who enjoyed traveling the woods more than tending his family. However, in a masterful new biography,* historian Richard Rhodes debunks a number of these persistent myths about the world?s most famous artist-naturalist. This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever been fascinated by the magnificent double-elephant folio, Birds of America. Rhodes has woven a detailed and interpretive adventure story, revealing for the first time the surprising forces of talent, social upheaval, love, and personal struggle that led Audubon to create one of mankind?s great artistic masterpieces.

At age 32, Audubon was still struggling to collect on debts owed him that might have permitted yet another business recovery, when he began making pocket money by sketching portraits of people. Moreover, a fortuitous encounter with Alexander Wilson (“father of American ornithology” but a morose loner) years earlier also had sown an idea in his head. Passionately interested in birds since early childhood, he had proudly observed that his own accumulating collection of bird portraits was vastly superior to Wilson?s stiff, lifeless caricatures. Indeed, he had encountered a number of species that were undiscovered by Wilson. Could he be so bold as to attempt to paint every American bird?

Two measures of Audubon?s brilliance stand out. The first is his early and unflinching dedication to paint every species in feather-perfect detail, fully life-sized, and dramatically posed in ecological and social context. He vowed to portray the very spirit as well as the beauty of birds, and it was this powerful break from tradition that eventually would catch the attention of patrons in England. The second measure, painted in unprecedented clarity by Rhodes, is the deeply personal anguish that Audubon endured during his long struggle in England away from Lucy and the children, to whom he remained utterly devoted. Slowly, painfully, Audubon?s genius prevailed, and he converted a labor of love into the business triumph that had eluded him along the Ohio River. From his dainty warblers frozen in midair to his huge wading birds garishly postured life-sized on the page, I will never again look at an Audubon image without marveling at the energy and passion of the truly remarkable man inside it.

—John W. Fitzpatrick, Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director

*John James Audubon: The Making of an American. Richard Rhodes, 2004, Knopf, New York, 514 pp., 16 color plates, 4 maps, 85 b&w illustrations

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu