John James Audubon was born in Les Cayes, Santo Domingo (now Haiti), the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and his French mistress. He grew up in France, and took a lively interest in birds, nature, and drawing. In 1803, at the age of 18, to avoid conscription in Napoleon’s army, he went to live on his father’s plantation in America, near Philadelphia, where he hunted, studied, and drew birds. Audubon spent more than a decade as a businessman and was quite successful for a time, but by 1819 he was being jailed for bankruptcy. It was then he took a gamble and embarked on an epic mission to document and draw all of America’s birds.
For several years Audubon travelled extensively, sketching and writing, producing over 400 detailed drawings. His intent was to turn them into a portfolio of engravings that depicted the birds in a life-sized format. Failing to find support or a printer willing to take this on in the United States, he sailed with his partly finished collection to England in 1826 where he mounted several exhibitions. His work met with great success and his four-volume opus The Birds of America was at last printed in London by Havell & Son in 1827. Accompanying it was the Ornithological Biography, which featured text about the lives and behaviors of Audubon’s subjects as well as notes on his travels.
With the success and continued demand for his work, Audubon began work on a more compact edition of Birds of America, the Royal Octavo edition. These reduced version lithographs of his larger folio subjects were first published in 1840 and printed by J.T. Bowen in Philadelphia. Having tackled the avian world to the fullest extent, in 1843 Audubon turned to mammals. He ventured west to the Missouri River where he undertook research for his new work titled The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. These too would be printed in several editions and formats due to its immense popularity.
John James Audubon died at home on January 27, 1851, and was buried at Trinity Cemetery in New York City. For half a century he was America’s dominant wildlife artists and his respect and concern for the natural world would come to influence modern conservationism and environmentalism movements, such as the National Audubon Society named in his honor.
