Richard Rhodes
John James Audubon:
The Making of an American.
Knopf, 516 pages, $30
The threads of John James Audubon’s achievement—scientific, commercial, and artistic—are coiled so tightly that they can scarcely be separated. Nor should they be, for once disentangled, Audubon’s talents unravel into nothingness. The scientist was a precocious amateur with a knack for field work—no more; the businessman was a bungler, the perpetual victim of his own negligence; and even the artist was at best a fluent draftsman, who wisely learned to work within his fairly narrow limits. But once Audubon brought these three diffident personae into alignment, he became a prodigy, and the creator of America’s greatest work of graphic art, The Birds of America (1827–1838).
The scope of Audubon’s book was staggering: 435 plates were drawn and executed, which depicted a grand total of 1065 birds and described 489 separate species. Each was itself a feat of print-making, employing four distinct techniques: etching, engraving, aquatint, and the final process of hand-coloring. The aquatint was the most demanding, involving the immersion of the prepared plate in an acid bath to give it a richly mottled and stippled surface, so as to represent the various textures of feathers and foliage. The Birds of America was the last of the great aquatint productions, for the technique was laborious and was shortly to be supplanted by the much easier—and less subtle—lithograph.
But technical proficiency alone does not account for the phenomenal commercial success of The Birds of America. Nor can it be explained away as the perennial American weakness for sentimental subject matter, especially when presented in the terms of an unchallenging, easily digestible realism. Audubon’s public has always been appreciative, if unconsciously, of his aesthetic gifts, such as his graceful and elegant sense of line. It is hardly a coincidence that his most popular work shows the most sinuously linear of birds, the American Flamingo (plate 431), which this year set a record for the highest price paid for an individual Audubon print: $197,900.
Now Richard Rhodes, the author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Making of the Atomic Bomb, tackles the enigma of Audubon. John James Audubon: The Making of an American, like his earlier book, is the step-by-step chronicle of a great project, told with urgency and momentum. Audubon was born in 1785 in what is now Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French planter. Just before the slave revolt of 1791, his father prudently sold some of his land and used the proceeds to buy an estate near Philadelphia. The boy was brought up in France, where he had a smattering of an artistic education, and upon turning eighteen was sent to Philadelphia to manage his father’s lands. There he learned English in a Quaker boarding house, and to say thee and thou, a habit he retained until his death. He also encountered the tantalizing world of Philadelphia culture, coming into contact with Alexander Wilson, the author of American Ornithology, and the portrait painter Thomas Sully.
For two decades, Audubon was a businessman of almost comic ineptitude. His ill-fated ventures included a lead mine on his Philadelphia estate, a flour mill in Kentucky, a drawing school in Cincinnati—each of which ended in failure and flight. He was a reliable victim of fraud, to a comical extent, and lived hand to mouth on promissory notes and letters of credit. It was not a life for the faint at heart. On one memorable occasion, he allowed himself be beaten with a club by a man who had swindled him out of a steamboat, in order to be able to stab the scoundrel in self-defense.
But this hardscrabble existence gave him the executive ability that was essential to the completion of his grand project, which he hatched in 1820. Over the next six years Audubon undertook sketching expeditions along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and into the bayous of Louisiana. When his publishing proposal found a cool reception in Philadelphia, he decided to publish the prints himself, sailing in 1826 to England, since plates of the size and quality he envisioned were beyond the scope of American printers.
Audubon’s struggles with his engravers, and struggles to secure the advance subscribers necessary to finance the undertaking, comprise the dramatic heart of the book. It is an extraordinary case study of capitalism in action. He raised the full amount—over $115,000—himself, supplementing the faltering subscriptions by exhibiting his paintings and even by selling the bird skins themselves. But even when strapped for cash, he continued to enlarge the contents, undertaking expeditions to the Florida Keys in 1831 and to Labrador in 1833. When he completed the last of his 87 installments in 1839, he had enrolled 161 subscribers for the double elephant folio edition (an octavo version followed immediately). A complete set cost $1000 at the time; a few years ago one sold for four million dollars.
The Audubon story is intrinsically winning, and Rhodes’s witty and well-paced narrative does it justice, although he falters somewhat under the sheer mass of biographical material (Audubon was a great compiler even in his personal life, and left a mountain of letters, diaries, and autobiographical sketches). So intimate are the day-by-day records, such as Audubon’s poignant letters to his long-suffering—or so I infer—wife, that Rhodes does not always step back to give us the big picture. For one thing, he might have said more about what a fertile moment this was in science. The frontier of biology was still taxonomy, the work of identifying and classifying new species according to their anatomical features—and fitting them into the great inventory of species devised by Linnaeus. For the amateur scientist, whose only qualifications were a steady pencil and a capacity for patient observation, it was a golden age. An untrained and dogged empiricist might still make an enormous scientific contribution, as Audubon did.
Because he is weak on the scientific context, Rhodes does not always take the full measure of an event, such as Audubon’s 1818 encounter with Constantine Rafinesque (1783–1840). Rafinesque was an absurd figure of a type possible only in antebellum America: botanist, inventor, philologist, charlatan. Much of what he did was pure hucksterism, such as his public offer to reveal the secret of making buildings fireproof—to anyone who would pay him $1000. But like Audubon, he too was an artist/naturalist, who had made his mark with a torrent of scientific pamphlets. It is at least possible that his example suggested to Audubon how he might reconcile his joint interests in art and science. Yet Rhodes milks Audubon’s meeting with Rafinesque for comic value, repeating a familiar anecdote about the botanist lunging at bats during the night.
Where Rhodes has copious sources, he writes copiously, but where he does not, he is maddeningly incurious. He says virtually nothing about Audubon’s life before the age of eighteen. It is the rather skimpy treatment of Audubon as an artist where Rhodes’s story is most vexing. Did Audubon study with the great David, as he later claimed? It seems impossible, but it is likely that he had some training, and here Rhodes ought to have least discussed the range of possibilities.
Audubon’s fine graphic fluency was ideally suited for birds, and when he strayed to mammals in his Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, his sequel to the Birds of America, the results are far less satisfying artistically, although unobjectionable anatomically. In a certain sense his talent was that of a graphic artist: he presented tightly drawn forms in arresting and memorable silhouettes, strongly suggestive of action. Of course, his subjects were not active, and were usually freshly killed, but he compensated for their inertness with an ingenious device of his own invention. This was a gridded board, studded with sharpened pins on which he impaled his subjects. The pins let him affix the bird in any pose he desired, while the grid guided the transfer of proportions to paper. By carefully adjusting the pins and the pose, Audubon could calibrate the precise degree of action and gesture required. Here he imparted to the drawings—which are otherwise rather sleek and impersonal—an uncanny kinetic quality that is the result of his own years of observing birds, and their miniature repertoire of movements.
It is Audubon’s ability to transmit this body sense, in an almost seismographic manner, to his prints that is the source of their enduring fascination. I found myself wishing that Rhodes had spent as much time on Audubon the artist as he did on Audubon the entrepreneur in this otherwise spellbinding and oddly moving biography.