In defence of John James Audubon 

The text of this well illustrated book is mostly John James Audubon’s, from journals unpublished in his lifetime. Part I describes his 1826 voyage from America to England to set in motion the great task – which would take 11 years – of fundraising for the printing of his mighty double elephant folio book in four volumes, The Birds of America. Part III is devoted to his 1833 seabird searching expedition to Labrador. The well chosen excerpts are introduced and meticulously annotated. 

Audubon’s innate love of birds grew into a grand ambition to observe, record and publish life-size images – never previously attempted anywhere – of all the birds of North America. He did this before photography proved his dramatic rendering of movement correct. Although an expert taxonomist, his models were not stuffed, but specimens shot and wired in lifelike attitudes before their colours drained. The drawings were rough, intended to be perfected as engravings, principally by Robert Harvell in London. An entry from his diary on his voyage to Labrador reads:

July 8: Rainy, dirty weather… Began drawing at half-past three a.m… the fog collects and falls in large drops from the rigging on my table, and now and then I am obliged to… work almost in darkness.

And this observation, from an essay on the oystercatcher:

Small crabs, fiddlers and sea worms are also caught by it, the shells of which I have found in a broken state in its gizzard… while on wet sea beaches it pats the sand to force out the insects.

He tied thread to the legs of migrant songbirds, an early example of tagging, and wrote:

You will conclude, as I have often done, that Nature’s means for providing small animals for the use of larger ones, and vice versa, are as ample as is the grandeur of the world.

Yet he abhorred the plundering of ‘eggers’, who traded wild bird eggs: ‘the pest of the feathered tribes.’

In Labrador he had tea with the captain and officers of the Royal Navy’s surveying brig Gulane, ‘gentlemen of education and refined manners’. Conversation turned to the decline of the local tribes, with whom Audubon also consorted:

Someone said it is rum which is destroying the poor Indians. I replied, I think not, they are disappearing here from loss of all hope, as they lose sight of all that was abundant before the white man came… Nature herself is perishing.

Today Audubon is under attack in America for racism, bird killing and white supremacism. Even the National Audubon Society, the foremost US conservation society, threatens to remove his name. This book claims to confront ‘the challenges Audubon’s legacy poses for us today, including his participation in American slavery and the thousands of birds he killed for his art’. His sea captain father traded African slaves when on Haiti, but Audubon’s endless journeying required minimal involvement, and at home his wife Lucy’s slaves amounted to a small, albeit unsalaried staff. 

It is similarly indicative that the little art analysis in the book is used as evidence for the prosecution. Audubon’s stricken black-backed gull is a masterpiece; but for the editor Christopher Irmscher, the predatory bird is seen as ‘a kind of unsavoury alter ego for Audubon’.

Irmscher’s subjective response is at odds with the admiration Audubon’s work received from such contemporaries and supporters as Sir Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Bewick and Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Neglect of his place historically is especially regrettable in the context of later art. The stark seabird pictures have particularly appealed to notable modern artists, as the recent Milton Avery exhibition showed. Peter Phillips is an English example.

For Baron Cuvier (1769-1832), the father of palaeontology, The Birds of America was ‘the most magnificent monument which has yet been raised to ornithology’. So it remains. The last double elephant folio set, sold at auction from Lord Hesketh’s collection 20 years ago, fetched $11.5 million – still the record price for a printed book.