Jaipur Birding: Audubon and the bird art of America

For many years I was somewhat ambivalent in my opinion about the bird drawings of John James Audubon. And it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when and why this changed. Perhaps the tide turned during a chance conversation in 2018 about Audubon's art when it was pointed out to me that ...'this is ART!'

Indeed this is 'Art', not just bird art.

Some would argue (as I once did) that many of Audubon's birds are stylized and are not natural looking. That the pose is contrived. Would you actually see a heron in the wild as drawn above by Audubon? Maybe not. But that is one reason that this is 'art'.

For many of us the gold standard of bird illustrations are the lithographs of John Gould. Audubon's drawings are very different from Gould's. With Audubon you quite often get the charismatic virtuosity of Paganini's caprices for the violin, compared to the soothing lyricism of Chopin's preludes for the piano as with Gould. And just as it is with a piece of music, once you've listened to it a few times and have begun to understand what the artist is striving for, so it has been for me with Audubon's bird drawings.

The onomatopoeic Chuck-will's-widows are animated with excitement in the presence of a snake. Pedants point out that the snake has been incorrectly named by Audubon. But what is undeniable is the vitality of the drawing.

A Louisiana heron preens itself at the edge of a swamp. The vegetation appears to have been ravaged by a storm in the not-too-distant past.

A pair of curlews probes for crustaceans and mollusks with their impossibly-long bills. Just as the inhabitants of the city in the background would have searched for their fortunes in those exciting times in America?

So who was Audubon and what was his story?

To tell us something of Audubon we must turn to his biographer and foremost scholar- Richard Rhodes. His 'John James Audubon: The Making of an American' is an award-winning biography. And in Rhodes' introduction to a selection of Audubon's writings in 'The Audubon Reader' we have this succinct primer to Audubon:

'(Audubon)... explored the American wilderness from Galveston Bay to Newfoundland, hunted with Shawnees and Osages, rafted the Ohio and the Mississippi, identified, studied and drew almost five hundred species of American birds, saw English noblemen kneel before him to examine his dazzling drawings, raised the equivalent of several million dollars to publish a great work of art, wrote five volumes of "bird biographies" larded with narratives of pioneer life, won fame enough to dine with presidents and become a national icon, "The American Woodsman", his ultimate appellation, a name he gave himself.'

This 'great work of art' is, of course, 'The Birds of America'. Initially drawn over the course of five years from 1820 to 1825, it was first published in 1827. Audubon continued to add drawings of new birds to the book over the next ten years or so.

Audubon wanted to illustrate his birds almost life-size. He chose to make the drawings in double- elephant folio, each engraved and hand-coloured plate sized about two-by-three-foot.

Using this folio size would still present obvious problems: how do you fit a drawing of a very large bird, such as a flamingo, or a crane, or even a heron, onto a 2x3 ft. sheet? And still manage to make these illustrations comparable to those of tiny birds, such as hummingbirds?

This is how such paintings compare on the actual plates. Not unsurprisingly, the flamingo's neck has to be swung right down to the toes to fit the plate (but that is how they feed, don't they?). The hummingbirds have the run of the sheet - full freedom and space to hover easily over nectar-filled blossoms.

In an earlier post about another classic bird artist Edward Lear, we had seen that he drew most of his birds from captive specimens in zoos.

http://jaipurbirding.blogspot.com/2020/07/edward-lear-bird-artist-extraordinaire.html

Not so Audubon.

Audubon observed at first-hand, in the wild, what he drew. With shotgun in hand he explored large swathes of frontier-expanding America in search of his specimens. Any unfamiliar-looking bird was shot and examined minutely. This may sound unsettling to some readers today, but in most cases it was a necessity from his point of view. Obviously in the early 1820's there were no sophisticated cameras with telephoto lenses. Many of the birds themselves had never been identified or described by science.

By 1826 Audubon was ready with his first tranche of water-colours of American birds. He traveled to England to find an engraver and to start displaying his drawings. Much like the modern day musician, who must perform in front of live audiences to earn from his creative output, he rented halls to display his works- with all the bells and whistles! Yes, literally so, since potential subscribers also needed to be entertained with impersonations of bird calls and with war cries of tomahawk-bearing hard-riding braves.

Over the years Audubon would make several expeditions to different parts of America to add new bird specimens to his collection of drawings. His adventures in the newly-opened frontiers of America make for interesting reading. His writings are evocative of the landscape, of the many perils of the journeys, and of the excitement of the chase. These 'bird biographies' were published as accompaniments to the bird drawings. The bird observations are accurate and detailed enough to for him to be called an ornithologist.

There is also a sense of poignancy as we look at some of the drawings today. For instance, Audubon observed Passenger pigeons in the 'millions'. Modern estimates put their numbers in America at that time at 3 billion! Fully one-third the numbers of all American bird species put together. Now there isn't even one.

A clearly enamored pair of Passenger pigeons. This painting reminds us of the multitudes that Audubon describes in his writings- not unlike the vast herds of buffalo that once grazed the plains of America back then.

Here is an extract from Audubon's essay on the Passenger pigeons:

'I cannot describe to you the extreme beauty of their aerial evolutions when a Hawk chanced to press upon the rear of the flock. At once, like a torrent, and with a noise like thunder, they rushed into a compact mass, pressing upon each other towards the center. In these almost solid masses they darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a serpent.'