Arts and Sciences

In the extensive publications about John James Audubon (Fig. 1), the artist-naturalist who was America’s first great watercolorist, his art has not received the same attention as his dramatic life and his contributions to natural history, especially in The Birds of America. My new book, Audubon as Artist: A New Look at The Birds of America, seeks to balance and illuminate a largely ignored topic: Audubon’s relationship with other artists, his debt to them and his struggles to identify his vocation. Unlike most great artists who reach their stride in their twenties, Audubon did not find his until he was over forty years old. Nevertheless, one might look at him as a nineteenth-century American Leonardo da Vinci, who married art and science in his works. Like his Renaissance predecessor, Audubon was a brilliant artist and innovator, albeit a charismatic but difficult personality, and a creative “rock star” entrepreneur whose personal drive and extraordinary gifts changed the way people view the world and, specifically, birds.

In the past, scholars have concluded that Audubon rarely based his compositions on paintings by fellow artists, a notion contradicted by a close examination of the art-historical record. For instance, aspects of The Birds of America and Audubon’s oil painting English Pheasants Surprised by a Dog (Fig. 2) are clearly forecasted by the painted tableaux of game by French animalier Jean-Baptiste Oudry. Oudry’s action-filled scenes, like that in Hawk Attacking Ducks (Fig. 3), known in many versions and prints, throb with a drama arising from the artist’s empathy with wild creatures and his studies of wildlife. Because Oudry placed species in naturalistic settings and enlivened their interactions with a compelling visual narrative, he ranks as the closest predecessor in the fine arts to Audubon. His smaller drawings of live birds from menageries (Fig. 4) also foreshadow Audubon’s animated achievements, such as his Snowy Egret (Fig. 5). Some of the similarities may be due to species’ characteristics, but the interest in representing an action taking place or “becoming” before our very eyes, as in baroque art, is common to both artists and was the takeaway for Audubon. While Oudry’s egret is clearly striding forwards with its left leg raised, its filmy breeding aigrettes (also the French word for an egret), used for mating displays, blown back from its head, Audubon’s smaller snowy egret’s action is subtler and more psychological. Audubon emphasizes the bird’s deliberate stalking along the water’s edge, with its back right foot beginning to coil up, like a clock spring, as it strides forwards over flattened vegetation. The elegant bird regards the viewer warily with its piercing right eye, and with its left, the distant generic hunter (the greatest enemy of this species at the time, when it was a delicacy for the table, and the only human represented in all 435 plates).

The most frequently recognized influence from another artist’s work is Audubon’s Golden Eagle (Fig. 6), which dates from 1833 and was inspired in part by Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (Fig. 7). Known in five versions, the original canvas was in Madrid until 1812, when it was taken to the United States by Napoleon’s older brother, Joseph Bonaparte, after his abdication as king of Spain, and was hung at Joseph’s Point Breeze estate in Bordentown, New Jersey, near Philadelphia. The image was also widely disseminated in prints, as early as 1801–1809 (the Saint-Cloud version), and the Malmaison version was engraved by Raphael Morghen in 1812–1813.

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David had portrayed an idealized Napoleon heroically pointing the way over the Alps through the Great St Bernard Pass. For his Golden Eagle, the model for Havell plate 181 (Fig. 8), Audubon may have consulted an engraving after David’s work or, alternatively, if he had visited Point Breeze, he remembered David’s painting when composing the watercolor. Audubon is not recorded as having visited the estate, and his single documented meeting with Joseph was in New York’s Battery Park in August 1824, although Joseph’s nephew, Charles-Lucien, was Audubon’s friend. The artist may have visited Point Breeze because the young Bonaparte kept his extensive collection of bird specimens there and was sometimes in residence. Moreover, Audubon sent letters to him at that address. Regardless, he knew both David’s masterpiece and a lost painting based on it by Rembrandt Peale, Napoleon on Horseback. Most revealing is that Audubon identified Rembrandt Peale’s painting as “Napoleon Crossing the Alps,” substantiating his knowledge of David’s composition.

As in David’s composition, Audubon positioned his life-size golden eagle in the frontal plane, where both protagonists engage the viewer. Audubon did not obtain his specimen in the manner depicted in the detail at the lower left of the watercolor (Fig. 6a). Rather, he purchased a live adult female that had been severely injured in a trap (he misjudged the sex) in Boston from Ethan Allen Greenwood, the proprietor of the New England Museum.

By referring to David’s famous composition, Audubon asserted his indebtedness to the prestigious painter and his equality as an artist. However, the lessons he learned from David override any specific inspiration from one painting, justifying the self-trained artist’s references to him as his “master.” From David he gleaned the powerful principles of neoclassical art—simple, isocephalic compositions with outlined figures in dramatic, even theatrical, postures frequently based on geometry—characteristics that he would mine in endless variations.

Deserving of the moniker of Old Master himself, Audubon did not simply derive his golden eagle composition from David. For the concept of the voracious raptor carrying away its prey, he had digested Rembrandt’s arresting Abduction of Ganymede, not the oil painting but rather a print after it (Fig. 9). Audubon’s admiration for the Dutch master peppers his writings. For example, during a visit to the Earl of Morton and his wife in 1826, he noted that, among the works that impressed him, there was a “beautiful head by Rembrandt,” and in his essay “Method of Drawing Birds,” he cites the Dutch master as a paragon of portraitists.

Like all great artists, Audubon influenced later generations, just as he had learned from studying the works by other artists. As explored in this volume, he layered many of these lessons into his watercolor models and plates for The Birds of America, endowing his dazzling tableaux with a profound resonance and gravitas which, after two centuries, still proclaim the fierce beauty of the natural world.

The article is excerpted and adapted from Audubon as Artist: A New Look at The Birds of America, published by Reaktion Books (London, 2024).

ROBERTA J. M. OLSON is curator of drawings emerita at the New-York Historical Society.