When John James Audubon created The Birds of America, his landmark pictorial survey of avian life, he was thinking of America in a broad sense—namely, the wildlife habitats in and around the whole North American continent. Most of the species in his massive, four-volume book were seen and drawn within his adopted country, the United States. But in the summer of 1833, Audubon made a three-month expedition to Labrador, a part of Canada especially rich in natural wonders. Here, Peter B. Logan focuses on Audubon’s Labrador period as a pivotal time in his work on The Birds of America.
If it’s true that Labrador provided an epiphany for Audubon, it’s also true that his life was full of other vivid high points and equally dramatic lows. He was, like so many figures of the American frontier, touched by the vagaries of boom and bust—a man perilously perched, at any given moment in any season, between victory and disaster.
Born in 1785 in what is now Haiti to a French merchant and a chambermaid his father had taken as a mistress, Audubon spent his earliest years on a sugar plantation. But a slave revolt forced the household to relocate to France. His mother had died, and his father’s wife adopted Audubon as her own. Audubon arrived in France just in time to navigate the terrors of the French Revolution, then the rise of Napoleon. In 1803, Audubon’s father sent him to America to avoid conscription in Napoleon’s army.
By 1819 Audubon’s life seemed, finally, settled. He was a prosperous merchant on the Kentucky frontier, a naturalized American, a happy husband and father. Then a national economic downturn bankrupted his business, a crisis that proved both painful and liberating. With nothing left to lose, Audubon turned to his bird art, until then a sideline, as his primary occupation, hatching a scheme to create the most comprehensive visual record of American birds ever produced. Lean years followed, then smashing international success—and then, in an epilogue that would seem overwritten if it weren’t fact, the loss of the family’s hard-won fortune after Audubon’s death in 1851.
Audubon’s gains and losses were always big and dramatic, just like his art, in which scale sometimes seemed to loom as a form of conceit. He depicted the subjects of The Birds of America lifesize—even the flamingo—which required a format that was more than two feet wide and more than a yard tall.
The 435 images of The Birds of America, released between 1827 and 1838, were enormously expensive, costing about $1,000 (over $20,000 in today’s dollars) for the whole set. Only an obsessive egotist could conceive a market for such a project. And as we’re reminded within these pages, the world’s most famous bird artist had a generally high opinion of himself, although his seeming self-confidence masked, perhaps not always convincingly, a lingering sense of insecurity.
“The desire to craft his own persona and exaggerate his accomplishments became a hallmark of the man,” Logan writes. “He could lie with aplomb and did so readily if he stood to gain and, just as importantly, thought he could get away with it.”
Audubon falsely claimed, for example, that he had studied under Jacques-Louis David. “But, in truth,” Logan adds, “Audubon was largely self-taught, which makes his ultimate accomplishments even grander.” Audubon was inevitably the biggest (and often the only) character of every story he told, an engaging self-dramatist. He was a vividly gifted writer as well as a visual artist, but the mythic personal presence he evoked in his letters, journals, and ornithological writings often shadowed his friends and associates in obscurity. It’s easy to forget, for instance, that many of the copiously detailed backgrounds for Audubon’s bird pictures were done by Joseph Mason, a bright young artist who accompanied him on many scouting trips. Audubon glancingly mentions his talented protégé in his narratives, conveniently leaving us to assume his career is a one-man show. This pattern is a complication for biographers, who must sometimes rely on Audubon’s accounts as the only surviving record of his adventures.
Perhaps the biggest contribution that Logan makes to Audubon scholarship is his detailed placement of the artist within a larger ensemble of characters who informed and sustained his genius. They include Tom Lincoln, a young amateur naturalist recruited by Audubon for his Labrador expedition, and George C. Shattuck Jr., another expedition member whose lively account provides a nice counterpoint to Audubon’s. There’s a bracing Robinson Crusoe feel to Shattuck’s journal from the period, the sharpness of isolation mixed with the thrill of discovery:
Audubon seemed to draw energy from his newfound friends in Labrador, and he needed the boost. He was worn out emotionally and physically, having suffered a “spasmodic affection” that was possibly a mild stroke, and Birds of America was bogged down in production problems. Logan writes: “The awareness he gained during the expedition, of his increasing physical limitations as well as his own mortality, was vitally important in spurring him on to the finish line.”
The losses that Audubon had experienced since childhood appeared to give him a deep sense of life’s impermanence, a sensibility that regularly informs his art. The jacket of this book features Audubon’s depiction of a pair of puffins, a fixture of the Labrador ecology. They’re adorable, of course, and the scene seems perfectly pastoral at first glance—except for the vigilant stare of one puffin, who gazes beyond the frame, possibly alert to predators. The other puffin crouches in a burrow, nature’s answer to adversities not far away. The colors are eye-popping, the birds pillow-plump, but there’s just a hint that this placid plenty could vanish in a heartbeat. It’s vintage Audubon: the art, like the man, teetering between exaltation and elegy, the promise of abundance and the prospect of annihilation.
The production values of Logan’s Audubon, like his subject, make a virtue of extravagance. It was designed by Rich Hendel, the dean of the trade, and the gorgeous maps of Labrador and its environs were done by the celebrated cartographer Jeff Ward. Logan includes nearly 300 pages of notes and other supplementary material at the back, fruits of a decade’s research. It’s a doorstopper of a volume that few commercial, or even academic, presses would tackle.
Logan is a lawyer who has written some essays about birding, but this is his first book. He has a lucid style, embracing Audubon’s technique of bringing a scene to life through layers of subtle detail. The book begins at Audubon’s 1833 sickbed, where we discover the color of his eyes, the quickness of his pulse, the fears on his mind, the mood of the room. It’s a window into a story that Logan renders with compelling clarity. In the tradition of Audubon’s bird studies, Audubon is improbably big and exacting, a project that seems too expansive to succeed. Against the odds, somehow it does.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Advocate in Baton Rouge, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
