About Books: Audubon’s Art and Audubon the Artist

Mark Lynch

The thrust of Audubon as Artist is to look at Audubon as a fine artist of his time. Many writers treat Audubon’s work as if they belong solely to the world of natural history illustration. Olson reveals that Audubon was indebted to the works of artists such as Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck. When he visited the homes of patrons in England, he always spent time carefully admiring their collections of paintings. Olson believes that The Birds of America was Audubon’s magnificent obsession: “What has perhaps not been sufficiently recognized is that Audubon did not want to be perceived solely as a scientific illustrator. Like all good artists, he studied works by artists from the past, together with those of his contemporaries.” (p. 9)

For example, Olson draws parallels between the style and imagery of some of Audubon’s early works, such as Purple Martin or Barn Owl (1803–05), both pastel and graphite works, and the popular “dead game” genre paintings of artists such as Willem van Aelst and Jean-Baptiste Oudry. These kinds of art historical insights into his work have for the most part been lacking in previous books about Audubon.

Though Audubon likely lied about actually studying with French painter Jacques-Louis David, he was certainly a serious admirer of David’s paintings.

From studying David, he would have absorbed the Neoclassical principles of tightly controlled, isocephalic compositions that keep the dramatis personae and action in the foreground (illus.7), something seen in nearly every watercolor and Havell plate (illus.8). (p. 33)

To illustrate this insight, Olson positions David’s Death of Socrates (1787) above Audubon’s Wild Turkey watercolor (1820) (p. 32). This juxtaposition has to be one of the first times those two artists have ever been compared or shown together. Olson is unabashedly passionate about the idea of Audubon as an artist of his time, even a poetic one:

At times his curiosity seems to know no bounds, and he frequently resorts to poetic comparisons, for example comparing the sound of a nighthawk in flight to a sail filling and snapping taut in the wind. And who can forget his characterizations of the ruby-throated hummingbird as a “glittering fragment of the rainbow” or a “curious florist”? (p. 11–12)

Though Audubon as Artist is organized chronologically, Olson is emphatic that the book is not intended as a biography (p. 14). Olson does show Audubon’s growth as an artist by showing his improvement and development in drawing certain species, including the nuthatch (p. 34–7). It is easy for the reader to see how Audubon improves over the years as he masters watercolor and other media and learns the art of dramatic composition. Audubon as Artist is thoroughly illustrated in color where applicable, and the visual pleasures of this book are considerable.

Many American artists were also a source of inspiration for Audubon, including Benjamin West, John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, and the Peales (p. 61). Audubon befriended “portrait painter and polymath” (p. 57) Charles Wilson Peale and spent much time in Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia. A number of the mounted specimens in the museum would influence the composition of several of Audubon’s works.

Unlike European museums, where specimens were exhibited against blank backgrounds, Peale showed his stuffed birds in lifelike attitudes, together with natural objects, against painted backgrounds suggesting their habitats; Sophonisba Angusciola Peale—Charles Wilson’s daughter, ornithologist and artist, and the first recorded American woman to collect and prepare bird specimens for scientific study—painted their frames. This stimulating environment inspired Audubon with artistic and ornithological material that shaped his art until his departure for England in 1826. (p. 57–8)

Of course, Olson writes about Audubon’s relationship and rivalry with Alexander Wilson.

Considered the father of American ornithology, Wilson’s work followed Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–43). Wilson became Audubon’s mentor via his volumes, two copies of which Audubon eventually owned. More than a field guide, Wilson’s taxonomy and other details were quoted by Audubon in inscriptions on his watercolors and in his writings. Through no fault of his own, Wilson was also Audubon’s nemesis because of the vitriolic transatlantic campaign spearheaded by the well-connected Philadelphia ornithologist George Ord, keeper of Wilson’s flame, who completed volumes eight and nine after the Scot’s untimely demise; in Britain, Ord’s vendetta was joined by the amateur naturalist Charles Waterton. (p. 63)

There has always been discussion about how much Audubon’s watercolors owe to Wilson’s published artwork. Olson considers some of this more of an “appropriation” of a layout or position of a bird, a practice that was common then and now. Certainly, Audubon’s Bald Eagle owes something to Wilson as well as to mounted specimens in Peale’s Museum.

Olson writes extensively about Audubon’s portrait drawing and how his work in this genre informed his bird paintings. This portraiture includes his infamous Fair Incognito (p. 87–91), a nude woman who posed for him in New Orleans.

In mid-February, when Audubon was in need of money and missing Lucy, who was peeved at being left behind, he was approached by a mysterious, veiled woman known as “the Fair Incognito”. A self-styled artist, the woman asked him to draw her full likeness in the nude on elephant-size paper. In exchange, this stunningly beautiful “femelle” each day corrected his drawing in “lead pencil” (graphite) outlines and black chalk. When the work was completed, she inscribed both of their names on the sheet and gave him a kiss and an expensive ($125) rifle. (p. 87–8)

He mentioned that her surname was Mrs. André in both a journal entry and a long letter complete with “salacious details” (p. 89) to his wife Lucy. Olson comments that this letter “demonstrates his ability as a master storyteller.” (p. 89) Olson writes further about the art tradition of drawing and painting nudes at that time, but the reader is left wondering about this whole incident or even if it really happened. The challenge for any writer about Audubon is that his writing, especially his journals, is unreliable (see discussion about Kaufman’s book below).

Audubon wrote that he destroyed much of his early work because it was so amateurish. There is even this story:

That July, while Audubon was away in Pennsylvania on one of his “rambles”, Norway rats shredded at least two hundred of his works containing “nearly a thousand inhabitants of the air”, which he had stored in a wooden box for safekeeping (OB, vol.1, p.xiii). After a fashion, the rats feathered their nest as depicted in a later, Meiji-period Japanese print (illus. 36). Stating with bravado that his art had progressed so far that he now found his own early works unacceptable, Audubon started over: “not exceeding three years had elapsed, I had my portfolio filled again” (OB, vol.1, p.xiv). Over many decades, he would prove to be phoenix-like, reinventing himself after each adversity. (p. 69–70)

Again, because he was such an unreliable narrator about his own life, one feels the need to take this story with a bit of skepticism. Audubon was all about re-inventing his public persona, to liven up his image as an artist, so the reader is left wondering about this entry. Yes, it could have happened, but did it?

One section of Olson’s discussion of Audubon’s use of assistants to complete his backgrounds or foliage is really amusing. Audubon worked with several assistants, including Joseph Mason.

They worked as associates in the Old Master tradition, which was then the accepted manner and is still operative in most artists’ workshops today—most overtly in the huge atelier of Jeff Koons, who never mentions the names of his assistants. Audubon’s collaborators executed the ever-inventive and evolving formulas that he pioneered as early as 1805–6 in Nantes. (p. 96)

That has to be the first time Audubon’s name has been used in the same sentence as renown bad-boy postmodernist artist Jeff Koons!

Olson’s book is thorough and certainly some of the work in Audubon as Artist will be new to most readers: In a journal entry for 12 July 1824, Audubon related, “I drew for Mr. Fairman a small grouse to be put on a bank-note belonging to the State of New Jersey.” The following year, his vignette of a tiny grouse was engraved on a banknote (illus. 64). It was his first work to be reproduced but is known in only three surviving sample sheets by a printing firm with Gideon Fairman: Fairman, Draper, Underwood & Co. of Philadelphia. (p. 119)

What a great trivia tidbit to uncover: that this small drawing of grouse on a banknote was his first work to be reproduced.

Audubon as Artist is a beautiful volume, profusely illustrated with color reproductions of not only Audubon’s work, but all the artists Olson compares Audubon to. This volume is also a scholarly book, thoroughly researched, that ultimately does provide a different view of Audubon as an artist. At first the reader may find it a bit jarring to consider Audubon’s work in the same breath as a painting by David, but that is Olson’s mission. Though this is a book as much about art history as birds, most readers will find it of real interest.

Was Audubon more of a naturalist/ornithologist or an artist? By marshalling the knowledge I have been privileged to gather, I hope that this volume begins to provide a fresh perspective and answers that question. (p. 14)

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Kenn Kaufman’s The Birds That Audubon Missed is a unique and personal take on Audubon, his art, his written work, and most of all what Audubon means today. In the end, The Birds That Audubon Missed is also about how Kaufman thinks about the meaning of birding now. Kaufman is well known in the birding community as a writer and author of his own field guide series. Since the 1980s he has been a consultant on birds for the National Audubon Society and a fellow of the American Ornithological Society.

Between 1827 and 1838 he would produce and publish 435 magnificent color plates of birds. Between 1831 and 1839 he would publish five hefty volumes of text, with detailed accounts of all the birds detected. These two great multipart works—The Birds of America and Ornithological Biography—would secure the fame of John James Audubon all over the world. (p. 3 The Birds That Audubon Missed)

The central conceit of Kaufman’s book is a fascinating one: Audubon had promised portraits of 400 birds to his engravers and publishers. He was working on a deadline. Why did he seem to miss a number of species that are so obvious to us today? Some species he neglected for obvious reasons, mostly the western species such as Prairie Falcon. But Audubon left out species he should have seen in his tramping around the eastern United States and Labrador. These missing species included Swainson’s and Gray-cheeked thrushes—both of which were also missed by Wilson. Also omitted by Audubon were Philadelphia Vireo, Kirtland’s Warbler, Snail Kite, Caspian Tern, and Baird’s Sandpiper. Even stranger is that Audubon included several species we do not know today. Kaufman discusses how Audubon could have missed these birds, but Kaufman then decides to do his own paintings of the birds left out in the style of Audubon! Talk about a classic Covid project. Of course, this project required Kaufman to study Audubon’s work in detail and ultimately channel the artist.

So I had spent time studying the style, analyzing the compositions, imagining how John James would have depicted those birds he never saw. But I hadn’t put any imagined illustrations down on paper. It took a global health crisis to shake me out of my inertia. (p. 72)

He examined what Audubon used for materials.

And for that color, he would try anything. Audubon’s earliest surviving bird drawings were done largely in pastels, which had been very popular in Europe when he was a boy. Later he used mainly watercolors. But Snyder’s team found that most of the originals for The Birds of America incorporated a variety of media, used in varied ways. Sometimes Audubon brushed on layer after layer of watercolor, for deep rich hues. Often he added some pastel on top of the watercolor, sometimes adding it while the paint was still wet. He might add white gouache for detail, although he would also create white areas by scraping away paint to expose the paper beneath. Black ink appeared in some cases for fine detail. (p. 257)

So, Kaufman could approximate Audubon’s materials, but what about Audubon’s layout? Kaufman had to paint not only the birds but include bits of appropriate vegetation and background in the paintings as Audubon did in his finished works. No, Kaufman was not going to shoot any birds and use a position board as Audubon did, but Kaufman was concerned about composition in paintings of the larger species. In the end, he composed his paintings like Audubon did: awkwardly.

Dealing with the largest species, by comparison, was not a challenge. To fit two Snail Kites into one composition, I just had to place them unnaturally close to each other, and in slightly awkward poses. And when you’re channeling Audubon, such an arrangement almost comes naturally. (p. 230)

Chapters about this wild project run throughout The Birds That Audubon Missed, and those alone would have made for an interesting book. Color reproductions of Kaufman’s “Audubons” are in the book. He is quite modest, even critical, about his success, but I think he certainly succeeded. But his painting project is not all Kaufman is after in this book. In The Birds That Audubon Missed, Kaufman is aiming for something larger, more nuanced, and personal. Interspersed are other chapters that detail what Kaufman thinks of Audubon and his legacy, and, more generally, what Kaufmann thinks about birding and birders today. He also writes about subjects including extinction, taxonomy, and the current political controversy over Audubon.

To begin with, what we know about Audubon through his journals and other writings is problematic.

Unfortunately, Audubon has a legacy of stretching the truth beyond the breaking point—sometimes exaggerating, sometimes making things up out of thin air. Flagrant examples of this tendency were suspected by some, even during his lifetime; more have continued to come to light as historians have looked critically at surviving documents of the era. (p. 7)

With that in mind, the two-volume Audubon and his Journals—edited by his granddaughter, Maria Audubon, and published in 1897—should be a trove of original information, a primary source we can trust. But it isn’t. (p. 7)

It has now been shown that Maria heavily edited John James Audubon’s writings, changed passages, and added on to others, and then destroyed the originals. So we do not know what is John James and what is Maria’s work to burnish his image. Decades later, ornithologist Elliot Coues added passages as well. Kaufman adds that Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, the written companion to his Birds of America, is filled with errors and suspect passages.

Again, that is just my guess, and I could be wrong. In trying to pin down details of Audubon’s life, we find ourselves in a dimly lit hall of mirrors. Stories and anecdotes surround us, many of them contradictory, while verifiable facts are as elusive as the sparrows of Labrador. (p. 12)

There are many tall tales that were written about the legendary figure of Daniel Boone, and Audubon contributed to these stories.

Many tall tales later added to the legend of Daniel Boone. Two came from Audubon who wrote of the man’s remarkable skill with a rifle and amazing powers of memory when they hunted together in the forests of Kentucky. But at the time these encounters supposedly took place, Boone was almost eighty years old and living in Missouri. (footnote p. 83)

Could Audubon even make stuff up as far as the species he painted? Consider his painting of the so-called Carbonated Warbler. Was this painting of a genuine bird that Audubon saw and took a specimen of? After discussing all the possibilities of what this odd species could be, Kaufman concludes, “Whether the Carbonated Warbler was a hybrid, an odd color form, a product of imagination, or a rare species on its way out, we’ll probably never know.” (p. 183)

Naturally Kaufman writes about the rivalry between Audubon and Wilson. Kaufman concludes that Audubon’s big, colorful paintings and engravings overshadowed all other aspects of Wilson’s career.

Of the two men, Wilson was a much better scientist and a better writer. But he could not compete with his rival’s illustrations. In the public eye, every other consideration was swept away by the visual impact of Audubon’s work. (p. 63)

In another chapter, Kaufman writes about the movement to change birds’ names because of the history of the person they were named after. This subject obviously pertains to John James Audubon, but there are many similar cases. Kaufman is very clear how he feels about this controversy. He writes about the formerly named McCown’s Longspur. Was it really critical to change the bird’s name? “Having a longspur named for a southern General McCown could be considered the avian equivalent of a Confederate monument. Why not take it down by simply renaming the bird?” (p. 330)

Kaufman had made his feelings clear on this subject well before the publishing of The Birds That Audubon Missed, and he has taken a lot of online heat for it. One commentator wrote: “This leftist loon wants to cancel birds!” (p. 331) Bird names have certainly been changed before. One of the best examples is Long-tailed Duck, which was formerly named Oldsquaw, a name that was sexist, racist, and even ageist. When the name was changed there was no loud gnashing of teeth. The fact that a vocal group of people are up in arms today is really about the tenor of our times and the impact of the Internet on discussion.

Kaufman makes an interesting comment about the people who are outraged about changing birds’ names: “But there are some people today who can shrug off the fact that Audubon bought and sold slaves, and then be outraged that he shot birds, and they leave me mystified.” (footnote p. 45)

At one point, Kaufman visits with legendary author, trip-leader, and birder Victor Emanuel. They talk about Emanuel’s sighting of an Eskimo Curlew in Texas many decades ago. That was a species Audubon did include in Birds of America. Kaufman asks if knowing that the curlew was close to extinction affected his enjoyment of the bird.

Victor leaned forward. “We don’t have to choose,” he said. “We can do both. We should do both. I think we should celebrate and enjoy the amazing, wonderful variety of birds that we have all around us. And that should inspire us to do what we can to preserve them for the future. These two things can enhance each other. We’ll appreciate what we have even more, if we acknowledge what we’ve lost.” (p. 276)

This thought triggers a reverie for Kaufman, and he reveals that he sometimes imagines what it was like to be a person interested in birds during the early days of naturalists like Audubon. To have the luxury of exploring a continent with new eyes at a time when many sightings were new to the European settlers and birds like the Eskimo Curlew were still common in breathtaking numbers. Suddenly The Birds That Audubon Missed becomes wistful.

But in my own dreams I sometimes find myself back there, two centuries or more into the past, hiking through those grand forests, paddling down those wild rivers. In these visions the United States is still a young country, and I am younger still, seeing everything for the first time. Somehow I’m sure that, around the next bend, a flash of wings will reveal some brand-new avian gem, a bird unknown to anyone but me, and still unnamed. These dreams are fleeting, and they come less often as I grow older, but I treasure them for the sense that anything is possible. (p. 17)

Kaufman also recounts the birds, now extinct, that once were so common. Species that were so abundant their movements could darken the skies. What have we lost when these birds disappeared?

But with birds such as the Passenger Pigeon or Eskimo Curlew, we didn’t just lose single elements of diversity, or single players from the play. We lost a level of abundance that was part of the defining character of this continent. (p. 283)

Were there so many birds at the time of Audubon that it was easy to miss a species or two among the throngs?

But from everything I have read, I am inclined to believe that birds, in all their glorious diversity, filled the woods and fields and skies of this continent in much higher numbers during the early 1800s than they do today. I have even wondered if the naturalists might have missed a few species simply because there were just so many birds to sort through. (p. 289)

Is it possible that Audubon missed some species because there were just so many birds?

Toward the conclusion of The Birds That Audubon Missed, Kaufman tries to come to peace with all that he knows about Audubon. He wonders if Audubon may have confronted the dark side of his own character just before he died.

Of course, we can’t know what was happening inside his mind in those last years. But I would like to think that his thoughts grew quieter and he gained an inner peace. That the raging fires of ambition and pride and hunger for knowledge would have straightened into a single pure flame in the new stillness. And in that stillness, he might have come to feel a deep empathy for all life and especially, finally, for his fellow humans. All of them. This is just wishful thinking, but I can’t help myself; I have to hold out for that hope of redemption. (p. 334)

The Birds That Audubon Missed is a far-ranging book that covers a lot of territory, though ostensibly a critical biography of Audubon as well as the story of Kaufman channeling Audubon the artist. Ultimately this revealing book is about Kenn Kaufman as an aging birder wrestling with what birding has become and what birding means to him. This fine book includes some of Kaufman’s best writing in his long career as an author and birder, and it deserves a wide audience even beyond the birding community. The Birds That Audubon Missed ends with Kaufman on a hot summer afternoon birding in Bartram’s garden in Philadelphia. He witnesses a group of children excited about discovering their first catbird.

This is what matters, I said to myself. We may remember those who found creatures considered new to science, but the magic happens on the personal level, when they are new to us. And the potential for such finds is always there. Miracles wait for us around every corner. (p. 367)

Literature Cited:

• Olson, R. J. M. and Pasachoff, J. M. 2019. Cosmos: The Art and Science of the Universe. Reaktion Books. London, U.K.

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To listen to Mark Lynch’s conversations with the authors on WICN, go to:

Roberta Olson Part 1: https://wicn.org/podcast/roberta-j-m-olson-audubon-as-artist/

Roberta Olson Part 2: https://wicn.org/podcast/roberta-j-m-olson-audubon-as-artist-pt-2/

Kenn Kaufman: https://wicn.org/podcast/kenn-kaufman/