FOR 36 YEARS, there has been a
When the National Gallery of Art put 47 of the original prints from its own complete collection on display, I just had to go for a look.
A friend and I went to Washington on Sunday to see them, and the first thing I noticed was not the prints but the number of visitors to the exhibit. Clearly, Audubon's work continues to excite and inspire, more than 150 years after his death.
This is strange, in a way, for many fine artists have shown us our North American bird life since Audubon. Some of them have done so with equal or greater accuracy, some with more artistic ability and flair for the dramatic. But at the time of his monumental work, none approached Audubon for the powerful combination of the two.
There is a vast and powerful public appeal in wildlife art, and it appears to have originated with Audubon.
When I began viewing these large prints, it was as though I had found a bunch of old friends in the National Gallery. I kept wanting to say, "Hey! I've got that one!" There was Audubon's painting of an osprey clutching a weakfish; the big white pelican that appears too heavy to fly; the flock of mockingbirds attacking--and being attacked by--a rattlesnake in their tree; warblers and ducks and songbirds galore. And the bald eagle--Audubon seemed especially intrigued by this symbol of the mastery of flight.
There wasn't space enough for the gallery to display its entire set of 435 Audubon prints, but the selections include a kind of gallery of the vanished: birds that have disappeared since the artist painted them, in the early 19th century. Audubon's striking portrait of the ivory-billed woodpecker--a bird thought gone forever until its rediscovery last spring in Arkansas--also is shown.
Audubon was an interesting individual. A rugged outdoorsman, he loved roaming the woods, and is known to have explored most of the eastern half of North America from Key West north to Newfoundland. As much as he wished to explore the West, he never made it, depending on preserved specimens to render them on paper.
Artists and scientists today study birds in the field largely with binoculars, telescopes and audio recording equipment, but in Audubon's time, optics were heavy and primitive and the shotgun was standard field gear--that's right, they shot them. In one of the most famous paintings of Audubon himself, he is shown cradling his trusty gun.
The great majority of Audubon's bird paintings show his subjects in a setting of trees, plants, flowers and occasionally other creatures typical of their environment. Contemporary critics faulted some of his choices for these settings, but they seem to have been motivated more by jealousy than facts.
While the artist closely supervised the painting of each background, he frequently left that work to close associates. Given the knowledge of field biology of his time, these details are remarkably accurate.
An odd item I learned about Audubon, the man, was that he liked to sample the flesh of birds he had killed. That's right, he tasted them, finding (like Goldilocks) some just awful, some so-so and others just right. The brant, for example, fell into the latter category.
The friend who went with me to this exhibit reminded me of a visit we made some years ago, probably in the early 1990s, to Mill Grove, Audubon's beautiful home near Philadelphia. Mill Grove had been the estate of Audubon's father when, in 1803, he sent his 18-year-old son to manage the property.
Mill Grove remains a beautiful place, both the home and its setting, on a hillside overlooking a large creek. The home, preserved today as a museum to its famous former owner, is well worth a visit. Later in life, Audubon wrote of the five years he lived there that they were among his happiest, with much of that time spent exploring the land.
It was also in those years that the budding young artist devised a unique method of mounting his specimens for use as models, threading them onto wires so that he could view them in any position desired. I remember an exhibit upstairs at Mill Grove explaining how he worked this out.
John James Audubon makes a fine case for working at one's art. A tough self-critic, he was essentially self-taught and was often dissatisfied with his earlier works. Yet over a period of years, he eventually developed the style and capability to task himself with picturing all known species of bird life in the America of the early 19th century.
When he thought his art ready for prime time, Audubon presented it to the country's top scientists, many of whom gave it a thumbs-down. He also had trouble finding an American printer to take on the big job of engraving and printing his paintings.
Audubon took his work to England, where it was immediately praised. There he found the printer who would handle his project and who would, in time, make his name an American household word. Audubon became immensely popular in the United States.
PAUL SULLIVAN, a former reporter with The Free Lance-Star, is a freelance writer living in Spotsylvania County. Contact him by mail at The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401; or by
Email: PBSullivan2@cs.com.