PBS American Masters_John James Audubon Drawn from Nature
Transcript
00:00In
00:291871, an aging widow sold 435 copper plates to be melted down as scrap.
00:38She was desperate for cash.
00:42One by one, the plates were fed into the smelter until a 14-year-old boy, the son of the factory
00:48foreman, realized what they were.
00:55He saved 79 of them.
00:58Seventy-nine original copper plates for the greatest book of paintings ever published
01:02about nature on this continent.
01:05The Birds of America, by John James Audubon.
01:21The Birds of America, by John James Audubon, by John James Audubon, by John James Audubon,
01:50by John James Audubon, by John James Audubon, by John James Audubon, by John James Audubon.
02:07They're just beautiful, beautiful hand-colored works on paper that are 170, 180 years old
02:12and they just grab you, bring you in.
02:16There are any number of images of Audubon's where the intensity of that presence, the
02:22wild animal engaging you directly, comes right across in a way that's unparalleled anywhere
02:27else.
02:29We all identify with Audubon's paintings of the birds because we can see in their faces
02:34what he wanted us to see and that was a personality and emotion.
02:40Audubon was something of a showman in his life and he exaggerated various tales about
02:44it but there was really no need for Audubon to exaggerate his life.
02:47It was like a Hollywood epic.
02:49He had a kind of personality that was totally captivating.
02:54Charisma, I think, doesn't do justice to what John James Audubon must have been like.
03:00John James Audubon was a walking contradiction.
03:04Meticulously accurate in his science, he told tall tales and even outright lies.
03:11His name is synonymous with American conservation but he killed thousands of birds.
03:17He was jailed for bankruptcy but dined with dukes, earls and presidents.
03:24He was a faithful husband and father who abandoned his wife and family for years at a time.
03:31He was a failed merchant and a fabulous success.
03:36For decades, he was obsessed by an impossible project and in the end, he accomplished it utterly.
03:45Audubon was born in what is now Haiti.
03:48His father was a French ship's captain.
03:51Audubon's mother was a French chambermaid in his father's house and she died when Audubon
03:59was six months old.
04:00So he was a bastard.
04:02In 19th century America, that was not something one would emphasize.
04:06So he made up stories about his background.
04:10He hinted that perhaps he was the lost heir to the throne of France.
04:15He said that he was born in Louisiana.
04:17He changed his story constantly.
04:22Here it is in the middle of the 19th century and he's creating one of those personalities
04:27that we've gotten used to artists doing.
04:29I mean, you have Bob Dylan coming out of the Midwest.
04:32He starts out as Zimmerman and he ends up as Dylan.
04:34He ends up this mythic figure.
04:37Audubon came to America.
04:38He created himself as this tremendous woodsman, this guy with buckskin and bear grease in
04:43his hair and larger than life.
04:48From the beginning, Audubon was a drama waiting to happen.
04:52In 1791, rebellion was brewing in the Caribbean.
04:57The French, led by a voodoo priest, revolted.
04:59They slaughtered every white they came across and were slaughtered in turn.
05:06But Captain Audubon managed to whisk his small son away to France and safety.
05:16For a time, Audubon's life in France seemed an idol.
05:21His father would take him walking and teach him the bird names.
05:24His father's friend, who was a ship's doctor, would teach him dissection and anatomy and
05:29taxidermy.
05:30But Audubon's childhood in France would not stay idyllic.
05:36He went through childhood during the worst of the terror that followed the French Revolution.
05:43Thousands of people were slaughtered around him in the city of Nantes when he was a little
05:49boy.
05:51At 18, the boy faced a new threat, conscription into Napoleon's army.
05:57Again, Audubon escaped by sailing away to the brand new country of America alone.
06:06In Pennsylvania, a beautiful state, my father, in his desire of proving my friend through
06:11my life, gave me what Americans call a beautiful plantation traversed by a creek.
06:18Captain Audubon had bought Mill Grove, a 284-acre farm outside Philadelphia.
06:24Perhaps his bright young son could run the property, or perhaps not.
06:29I was what, in plain terms, may be called extremely extravagant.
06:34I was ridiculously fond of dress.
06:37I was, like most young men, filled with a love of amusement.
06:41And not a ball, a skating match, or riding party took place without me.
06:48He was a good dancer.
06:49He was a musician.
06:51He was someone who could be, I think, the life of the party when he wanted to be.
06:55But the Bon Vivant had another side.
06:58Audubon's study was a homemade museum.
07:02The room was filled with stuffed birds, bird skins, eggs and nests that he had collected,
07:09snakes and amphibians pickled in jars around the room, bees' nests, and just a variety
07:17of natural history items that he had found around the place.
07:22One part of nature was fast becoming an obsession.
07:27He studied them on the ground.
07:28He watched them.
07:29He even caught some and studied their habits.
07:32He would lie for hours in the swamps and the bushes studying the birds and writing down
07:36everything he could about their behaviors.
07:39When Audubon first started painting birds, nobody really knew how to make a bird look
07:43alive.
07:44They might be posed sitting on a twig, but otherwise they were kind of flat and lifeless.
07:49Proportions were wrong, articulation was wrong, and Audubon fell into that too.
07:55My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples.
07:59So maimed were most of them that they resembled the mangled corpses on a field of battle.
08:05Audubon wanted to paint birds the way he saw them, which was alive and flying and doing
08:11all the things that birds do.
08:13Somewhere along the way, he got an inspiration.
08:15He said, in order to paint a bird wild, to make it look like it's alive, it better be
08:21pretty close to being alive.
08:23I've read many accounts of Audubon where they've tried to reconstruct how he worked, and they
08:28got it wrong almost every time.
08:30They imagined that he posed the birds in three-dimensional space on the branches or in some way like,
08:39almost like taxidermy, or wired them like mannequins or like marionettes.
08:44But it wasn't the case.
08:45This is what he did.
08:46I pierced the body with a wire and fixed it on the board.
08:50Another wire was made to hold the head in a pretty fair attitude.
08:55The last wire provided a delightful elevator to the bird's tail.
08:59So that begins to look like the kind of pose Audubon was fond of.
09:04And this gives you this perfect way of figuring things out.
09:06I mean, from this elbow to this tip, it's three squares up.
09:11I can find those coordinates perfectly.
09:14Here's the tip of the wing.
09:15There's the elbow.
09:16I can just draw a curve from that to that.
09:21This is the moment of expression.
09:23This was the moment for him of inspiration, posing the bird and giving it this lifelike
09:31fluid motion.
09:33It happened when he was posing the dead animal, not when he was making the drawing.
09:37I outlined the bird with the aid of a compass, and then colored and finished it.
09:43Audubon was able to work very rapidly.
09:47He was pretty much a workaholic.
09:53You really have a sense of this bird's character, its actual nature, its behavior, its presence
10:01in nature, in real life, in the moment of the setting it would be in, engaged in the
10:07kind of activity you'd be likely to see it in.
10:09And that's why in his paintings later on, it says, drawn from nature.
10:14When he was 19, Audubon was invited to the house of some new neighbors, the Bakewells.
10:20I recollect the morning and may it please God that I never forget it, when for the first
10:25time I entered Mr. Bakewell's dwelling.
10:28Where I sat, my gaze riveted on the young girl before me.
10:33She arose from her seat, and her form showed both grace and beauty, and my heart followed
10:40every one of her steps.
10:43She sat him down and arranged lunch, and by the end of that lunch, Audubon was already
10:50characteristically, since he was very vain, saying, I think she noticed me.
10:54Well, indeed she had.
10:57She was raised in a very strict family.
11:00Her father tried to raise his children with no emotion.
11:05When she met Audubon, he was pure emotion.
11:08I mean, he laughed, he sang, he danced, he did everything that was fun.
11:13He was open to all sorts of frivolities, you know, and this was a great release for her.
11:22Audubon and Lucie were married in April 1808.
11:27Just three days later, they left Mill Grove forever.
11:30The farm was divided up and sold, while the Audubons took the classic American journey.
11:35Young people heading west, toward the frontier.
11:38Audubon, with a partner named Rosier, had set up a general store in Louisville.
11:44My days were happy beyond human conception, and beyond this, I really cared not.
11:51I drew, I looked on nature.
11:54My young wife, who possessed talents far above par, was regarded as a gem.
12:00If I were jealous, I would have a bitter time with it, for every bird is my rival.
12:06But she had no human rivals, and their marriage flourished.
12:11In June 1809, Lucie gave birth to their first child, Victor, at a boarding hotel in Louisville.
12:19Louisville was still a rugged town.
12:21One visitor complained that science and literature have not found one friend in this place.
12:29The grumbler was a 43-year-old Scotsman, one Alexander Wilson, who had taken on the challenging
12:35project of writing and painting the very first ornithology of America.
12:41Wilson actually visited Audubon in Louisville and came into his store.
12:45He was canvassing for more subscriptions to his work.
12:49Wilson eventually had 450 subscribers.
12:53Audubon was getting ready to sign on the dotted line when his partner, Ferdinand Rosier, leaned
12:57over his shoulder and murmured in French so Wilson wouldn't understand.
13:01He said, yours are a whole lot better.
13:05Audubon reluctantly pulled his hand back and never subscribed to Wilson's work.
13:09Wilson was quite taken aback by this and asked if he could see any of Audubon's drawings.
13:15And Audubon said, well, sure.
13:16I took down a large portfolio, laid it on the table, and showed him the whole of the contents.
13:23He never had the most distant idea that any other individual had been engaged in forming
13:28such a collection.
13:30Wilson was completely surprised and astonished by what he saw because Audubon's work was
13:35at that point actually quite a bit better than Wilson's.
13:39There just isn't any comparison.
13:41This almost looks cartoonish.
13:43This looks like a child did it.
13:45The head's wrong, the tail's wrong, the feet are too big and they're wrong, they're too
13:49bulky.
13:51There's almost no detail to it.
13:53And this is art and this is illustration.
13:58But this is life-sized and everything is correct down to the last vein on the last feather.
14:05We hunted together and obtained birds which he had never before seen.
14:10But I did not subscribe to his work for even at that time my collection was greater than
14:15his.
14:16This encounter is important to Audubon and I think it plants in Audubon's mind the seed
14:20of an idea.
14:22Drawings of nature can be sold.
14:27After two years in Louisville, the restless Audubon went west again to Henderson, Kentucky,
14:33closer to the frontier.
14:34He set up another store but spent every spare moment drawing pictures of birds.
14:40To draw them, he had to kill them.
14:42Audubon did kill a lot of birds.
14:44He did on one occasion say that any day that he didn't shoot at least a hundred birds was
14:50a day wasted.
14:52He says that he had to kill as many birds as he did so that he could get good specimens
14:58for his art.
15:00He refers to himself as the two-legged monster armed with a gun that walks into a scene
15:06of life and turns into a complete carnage and then creates a painting out of it that
15:12is supposed to be life-like.
15:16This gun was actually Audubon's gun.
15:19It was a shotgun, meaning it wasn't a bullet.
15:21It was shot that was scattered and it was an efficient way to harvest specimens because
15:29they were small pieces of shot that didn't destroy the feathers and the actual specimen
15:35that he needed.
15:37Audubon we know was a terrific shot.
15:40He aimed and hit his mark.
15:45In Henderson, John and Lucy would swim across the Ohio for exercise, rocketing across half
15:50a mile of river and back.
15:53They were both strong swimmers and this of course it was the wilds of America.
15:59Most likely they didn't have a bathing costume and they were swimming au natural and it was
16:05part of, again, their love of nature, their participation in the springtime of the country.
16:12In 1812, their second son, John Woodhouse, was born in Henderson.
16:17This place saw my best days.
16:19I calculated to live and die in comfort.
16:23Our business was good.
16:24It was very prosperous.
16:26He had a store here.
16:27He had another store downriver at Shawneytown, Illinois.
16:31Within three years after he lived here, he was the second most wealthy man in the area.
16:37Audubon's success allowed Lucy to maintain her standards of luxury, even on the frontier.
16:44But not everyone was doing so well.
16:47In the summer of 1816, the crops froze three times and failed.
16:53People went hungry.
16:54At least there was to be one thing to eat that summer.
16:57A flock of passenger pigeons was about to come through Kentucky.
17:01A flock of over one billion birds.
17:05I arrived two hours before sunset.
17:07Everything was ready and all eyes were gazing on the clear sky.
17:11Suddenly there burst forth a general cry of, here they come.
17:16The pigeons are coming in by the thousands.
17:20They sit down on the branches.
17:22The branches snap, and they fall on the birds sitting beneath them, knocking them out.
17:29There's such a din that you can't even hear people shooting.
17:33You just see the fire around you, this general mayhem.
17:37It was a scene of uproar and confusion.
17:41The pigeons were constantly coming, and it was past midnight before I perceived a decrease
17:45in the number.
17:47For a week or more, the population fed on no other flesh than that of pigeons.
17:52Ottoman gives us a graphic picture of a bloodbath that really makes us think, too, about what's
18:00going on there.
18:02People unacquainted with these birds might naturally conclude that such dreadful havoc
18:06would soon put an end to the species.
18:10But I have satisfied myself that nothing but the gradual diminution of our forests can
18:14accomplish that decrease.
18:21This is a tray of passenger pigeon study skins, much like the specimens that John Ottoman
18:26would have prepared.
18:27Passenger pigeon is a beautiful pigeon.
18:29The males have this beautiful and turquoise iridescent pattern on the back, brick red
18:34or plum color on the breast, nice spotting pattern on their back, but a large pigeon.
18:40Unfortunately, it's extinct.
18:41It was shot by early market hunters in the early 1800s and got to a critical level where
18:48it just wouldn't reproduce anymore, and so unfortunately went extinct by the early 1900s.
18:57In the end, the passenger pigeon became a story about the American past.
19:02It seemed like a tall tale, a flock hundreds of miles long, birds by the billion, a story
19:10of rivers and mountains without end, of trees so big that people could cut a hole and drive
19:15a wagon right through, a story of a limitless America.
19:21But Ottoban was already finding a limit to his own prosperity.
19:25He built an enormous steam mill by the Ohio River, a crushingly expensive project.
19:31Years later, he cited just one reason for his financial downfall, himself.
19:37My business went on prosperously when I attended to it, but my thoughts were ever turning towards
19:42the birds.
19:43Beyond this, I really cared not.
19:46I could not bear to give the attention required by my business, and therefore my business
19:51abandoned me.
19:54Ottoban wasn't the only one whose business abandoned him.
19:58It was called the Panic of 1819.
20:02Business collapsed, and banks everywhere began calling in their loans.
20:08Suddenly strapped for cash, Ottoban tried to call in a loan he had made to a man named
20:13Samuel Bowen.
20:15Bowen refused, and a feud erupted.
20:21He complained of my conduct, and suddenly, raising his bludgeon, laid it about me.
20:28I moved not until he had given me about twelve severe blows.
20:35Drawing my dagger, I stabbed him, and he instantly fell.
20:40Bowen didn't die.
20:41All those charges were eventually brought against Ottoban, and they did end up in court
20:44over this incident.
20:46Eventually Ottoban was found not guilty.
20:49In a sense, the person Ottoban was really fighting was himself.
20:54He doubted his own abilities.
20:56His passion for painting the birds was leading nowhere.
21:00He could not even support his own family.
21:03His debts were still mounting, and owing money was a crime.
21:07That summer of 1819, John James Ottoban was clapped into a Louisville jail.
21:13To get released, he had to declare bankruptcy.
21:20Then came the day of the bankruptcy, and they took everything away from him.
21:25Lucy's piano, her family silver, her family china, the rugs off the floor, the curtains
21:31off the windows, their ducks and geese and cows and everything, including Ottoban's
21:37paintings, were put up for sale.
21:40In the end, of course, no one wanted his paintings, so he was allowed to keep those.
21:45She lost everything, that they were near and dear to her heart, things that she had brought
21:50from England and hoped to pass down through her family to her children, and gosh, it hurt.
21:57You can imagine how it hurt.
21:59One year earlier, their small daughter had died, just two years old.
22:04Alas, our poor, dear little daughter was unkindly born.
22:08She was always ill and suffering.
22:10Two years did her mother nurse her with all imaginable care.
22:15But she died in the arms which had held her so long and so tenderly.
22:20Soon Lucy gave birth to another baby, Rose.
22:24Seven months later, Rose too died.
22:29Ottoban had no money, no job, no home.
22:33The loss of everything that he and Lucy had been able to achieve in their years in Kentucky
22:39really knocked Ottoban off his feet.
22:42It threatened the future of his family, and it called into question what he was doing
22:46with his life.
22:48In October 1820, John James Ottoban set off on an epic quest, leaving Lucy and their sons
22:55behind.
22:56He would gamble on his talent and rescue his life with an impossible project.
23:01He would create an enormous book unlike anything ever made.
23:05He would paint the birds of America, all of them in the size of life.
23:11And he floats off down the Ohio River toward New Orleans with the idea in mind that he
23:16is going to explore America and complete his inventory of all the bird species.
23:22He wants to paint all the birds and identify all the birds that he can find in America.
23:29In January 1821, he arrived in New Orleans.
23:33He was penniless.
23:35To survive, he began to draw chalk portraits of the city's well-to-do.
23:41He made his living that way.
23:42He began to see that he could be an artist.
23:47It was a great discovery and a reassession of pride in himself and his abilities.
23:53One day, as he was walking in the streets of New Orleans, he was accosted by a veiled
23:58female who asked him if he wanted to draw her portrait.
24:03And he immediately said, yes, I can do that.
24:06It turns out that she wants him to paint her in the nude.
24:11Audubon was taken aback by this, said he had to walk around the block a couple times to
24:13settle his nerves.
24:15His professional composure vanishes.
24:19He's trembling like a leaf, he says.
24:21She drew the curtains and I heard her undress.
24:24I could not reconcile all the feelings that were necessary to draw well without mingling
24:29with them, some of a very different nature.
24:33Audubon was initially terribly, terribly nervous and uncomfortable, but not so nervous and
24:39uncomfortable that he couldn't do it.
24:42In fact, he seemed to rather enjoy it.
24:45Perceiving at once that the position, the light, and all had been carefully studied
24:49before, I told her I feared she looked only too well for my talent.
24:54She smiled and I began.
24:57The interesting thing about this episode is that Audubon felt obliged to inform Lucy in
25:03some detail as to what had happened.
25:07He did this in a long letter back to her.
25:09There's a lot of titillating stuff in it and really not the kind of thing that a doting
25:13husband would send to his concerned wife back home to reassure her that he's doing well.
25:20Because they were apart so much, Audubon in particular wanted her to share his very interesting
25:25life and that sometimes meant writing about infatuations he had, but he told her all these
25:32things in his letters, hoping that thereby when they were back together, they could in
25:38a sense re-experience the times when they were apart.
25:42By December 1821, Audubon finally had enough money to bring his family to Louisiana.
25:48Eventually, Lucy became a schoolmistress on a plantation while Audubon was making a breakthrough.
25:55He starts to look into the soul of the bird, to look into the depth of the feathers and
26:00starts to paint these birds in a much more lifelike appearance.
26:04A good example of the contrast between his earlier and later styles can be seen in one
26:10image and that is of the goshawks.
26:14The two lower birds, which have been cut out and pasted onto this sheet, are shown in profile.
26:21They're stiff.
26:22They don't appear to be moving.
26:25The upper bird has his feet spread apart.
26:28His beak is open.
26:30The wings are open.
26:32Everything about that bird is clearly a three-dimensional live bird that is existing in the world.
26:40Audubon evolved a method of drawing that had him employing a whole variety of media to
26:48achieve different effects.
26:49He's using pastel, ink, different kinds of chalks, oil painting.
26:54Gouache, watercolor, pencil.
26:57He made his own brushes, sometimes with a single bristle just to capture one for one
27:02each feather.
27:04Every single barbule in every single feather is outlined in iridescent graphite.
27:10So you have thousands in the Carolina parakeet alone.
27:15When you tip that complex multimedia work to the light, what you see are the sparkling
27:22graphites.
27:23The surface also moves.
27:28At first, Audubon's birds had drifted in space.
27:31But now, with his assistants painting the backgrounds, Audubon created tableau.
27:37Every picture told a story.
27:39You're plunged into scenes as if you're surrounded in the scene itself, often with terrific action
27:47unfolding right there in the moment.
27:50It's a female turkey racing through the brush with the young kind of skittering along.
27:54It's like you almost wonder if you saw them.
27:56They go by that fast.
27:57You hear them, and then you look, and then they're gone.
27:59And that sense of immediacy is in the print.
28:03Purple grackles just landed on some husks of corn.
28:06They wreak havoc on whatever field they descend on.
28:09And these husks are just torn open.
28:11And again, this almost kind of brazen look of amazement from the bird who engages you,
28:17without the viewer directly challenging you to enter into his world.
28:25In 1824, Audubon turned 39.
28:29He was now ready to show his work to the world.
28:32To publish his book, he needed financial support.
28:38Audubon came to Philadelphia and to the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1824 with a portfolio
28:43of watercolors, thinking that he was going to impress the established scientific community.
28:49Unfortunately, as people began to ooh and ah over his work, he began to explain how
28:54much better his work was than Alexander Wilson.
28:57Chairing the meeting at the Academy that day was a man named George Ord.
29:01He was a very close friend of Alexander Wilson's and was the executor of Wilson's estate.
29:07He and many in Philadelphia responded to Audubon in a hostile way.
29:12They found him to be cocky and self-assured and a little bit sort of like a hick.
29:19He appeared in country clothes and he was unkempt and also kind of arrogant.
29:27The impressive portfolio was not enough.
29:30There would be no money for Audubon or his book.
29:33Again, he had failed.
29:37No one in America would publish the birds of America.
29:41But now he knew where he had to go.
29:46In May 1826, the ship Delos left New Orleans for Liverpool, loaded with 924 bales of cotton
29:54and one ornithologist.
29:57As he sketched shipboard life, he had two months to reflect and worry.
30:04I leave my beloved America, my wife, children, and acquaintances.
30:09My body and face feel a sudden glow of apprehension that acts through my whole frame like an electric
30:14shock.
30:16He goes there scared out of his mind because this is my last chance.
30:22I've failed in America, I've failed here, I've failed there, and now if I fail here,
30:28what in the world can I do?
30:30He had never met a single soul in Liverpool, but just ten days after Audubon stepped ashore,
30:36the Royal Institution opened an exhibition of his paintings.
30:40Within two weeks, he was like a rock star.
30:43It was like this American woodsman comes out of nowhere with this huge portfolio of paintings.
30:49In the next 18 months, he showed his work in Edinburgh, London, and Paris, each time
30:54with swelling success.
30:56I am considered unrivaled in the art of drawing.
31:00The newspapers have given so many flattering accounts of my productions that I dare no
31:04longer look into any of them.
31:07As Audubon was trying to get this project off the ground, he had to show his original
31:11watercolors to a lot of people to get the subscribers, to get the financial backing.
31:17And so he became a kind of a one-man show.
31:20He would lug these things around, physically carry them from place to place, and put them
31:24out on display.
31:27He would tell stories about Indians and the wilderness, and the British public at that
31:32time was craving such stories.
31:35Everything that worked against Audubon when he'd gone to Philadelphia two years earlier
31:40worked in his favor in England.
31:41He was seen as an exotic creature when he got there, and a very appealing one.
31:46On his first visit to Edinburgh, his portrait was being painted with his hair greased back
31:50with bear grease, in buckskins and wolf fur collar.
31:56One of his games was to present himself as a man of mystery, as a nobleman of the forest.
32:03But in truth, he was deeply ashamed of the fact that he had been born a bastard, that
32:09he was illegitimate.
32:10And he was terribly afraid that the wealthy and the nobility of England who were buying
32:15the Birds of America on subscription would drop him as someone not worthy of their patronage
32:20if they knew of his low birth.
32:24The English ladies all appear very much surprised that I, so much in the woods, have not been
32:30devoured at least six times by tigers, bears, wolves, or a rat.
32:36He went into London and was just offended by the amount of smoke, the debris, the poverty,
32:43the prostitution.
32:44And compared to the purity of American wilderness, he found this really very depressing.
32:51Audubon began to collect subscribers.
32:54Now he needed someone to print the pictures, an engraver.
32:58Audubon lugged his massively heavy portfolio to Edinburgh and showed it to William Holm
33:03Lazarus, the leading engraver of Scotland.
33:08I slowly unbuckled the straps and without uttering a word, I turned up a drawing.
33:13And Lazarus was at first speechless and then said, my God, I don't think I've ever seen
33:18anything like this before.
33:20And he could say no more.
33:22Audubon had trumped everyone in England.
33:25Let's just put it up on here.
33:33Now this is one of the copper plates from Audubon's double elephant folio.
33:38It's the Arctic Gir Falcon.
33:40And it's one of the big plates.
33:42You can imagine what it was like to work with these things.
33:45They weigh 30 or 40 pounds apiece and all had to be hand carved.
33:52The process was complicated and exacting.
33:57First Audubon's painting was traced in pencil and the traced image pressed onto a copper
34:01plate.
34:03The engraver then carved the lines with a sharp needle.
34:07Acid deepened the cuts.
34:09The printer applied black ink into the grooves.
34:12The etched copper plate and a huge sheet of paper were crunched together in the press.
34:18Only the black lines and shading were printed.
34:20The other colors had to be painted in by hand for every print.
34:26The first print in the collection was the wild turkey.
34:31Lazarus produced 10 superb prints.
34:34But then his workers went on strike.
34:38Audubon traveled to London in search of a new printer.
34:41He soon found Robert Havel, Jr.
34:44Lazarus was the best in Scotland.
34:46Havel was the best in the world.
34:48And it was just a stroke of luck that Audubon and Havel came together when Havel was beginning
34:54his career as an engraver and Audubon was still at the beginning of the double elephant
35:00folio.
35:01For Robert Havel, it was the project of a lifetime.
35:05For the next 13 years, he would produce Audubon's The Birds of America.
35:09But you're talking about a project that lasted from 1826 all the way to 1839.
35:17About 185 complete copies were made at 435 prints apiece.
35:23He decided to portray the birds' life size, which is a tremendous endeavor.
35:26It's called the double elephant folio.
35:28They're huge.
35:29They're 28 by 38 inches or so.
35:32These were black and white engravings which were then hand colored.
35:37There were 40 or 50 young women in a room with one pot of watercolor and a brush.
35:43And they would fill in one part of the larger plate and pass it on to the next person who
35:47would fill in the next color.
35:49And this went around the room and that was one plate being produced in a set of about
35:54200.
35:55So there were 200 of those going around the room and then the next one.
35:59When you see one of Audubon's prints, you know exactly how big that bird was.
36:06You know the contour of it.
36:08You know the shading.
36:09You know the delicacy of the feathers.
36:12You know what it does, what it eats.
36:15And no one had ever done that before.
36:17Audubon envisioned a massive book, 435 plates, to come out in 87 installments of five prints.
36:26When you open the book and flip through it, you'll find that every five plates you come
36:30up with a big one, a big dazzler.
36:33And this was part of Audubon's marketing technique.
36:36He was selling these things to subscribers in groups of five.
36:40Each complete copy was about $1,000, which was a tremendous amount of money at that time.
36:47Only the very richest people could afford them.
36:52The cabinet that we have for the storage of the four volumes of the Birds of America is
36:59a Regency-style cabinet, which captures the kind of ceremony that was involved with showing
37:07the Birds of America.
37:08They were double elephant folio size.
37:10It was not the kind of thing that you casually pulled up to show your visitor after dinner
37:15over cigars and cognac.
37:17You needed several people to show these because they are so large.
37:24And so it's a kind of moving, almost bird-like apparatus that when you open two drawers to
37:31show two volumes, which you could simultaneously, look like a bird with its wings spread out,
37:36open in flight.
37:39And then you could turn the leaves of this double elephant folio size volume and show
37:44the birds like a tour through nature and a tour through the Birds of America.
37:51The King and Queen of England subscribed.
37:54So did the King of France.
37:56At 41, after decades of work, John James Audubon was an overnight success.
38:03He was famous, if not rich.
38:06There's a portrait that Audubon did while he was in England in 1826.
38:11That's a charcoal sketch of himself and he wrote under it, almost happy.
38:17What he was worried about was Lucy.
38:19They'd been separated for three years.
38:22He was about to lose her.
38:25Lucy, I think it will be best for both of us to separate, thou to marry in America and
38:32I to spend my life most miserably alone for the remainder of my days.
38:37I am sick of being alone and from thee and how much longer I will bear it is a little doubtful.
38:45It is enough now for me to say if I come, I give you myself, my endeavors to increase
38:50your happiness and my heart.
38:53Nothing more have I and I hope and trust for the advantage and comfort of us both.
38:59She thought he didn't want her anymore, that she was a drab provincial and he was now the
39:04toast of England.
39:05He thought that she wouldn't come to England to live with him because he hadn't made a fortune.
39:10In March 1829, Audubon left Havel special instructions for plate 64.
39:17Mr. Havel will please have Lucio Dubon's name on the plate instead of mine.
39:24With that, he sailed off to America.
39:27Even so, when he got to America, he first had to spend five months around Pennsylvania
39:32and New Jersey collecting the birds he needed for the next batch of plates.
39:37So Lucy's still pining away down in Louisiana.
39:40Finally he gets on a steamboat.
39:42He goes down the Ohio River, he goes down the Mississippi River.
39:46He arrives at the little port town of Bayou Sarah in the middle of the night.
39:51There's been a yellow fever epidemic.
39:53He goes into St. Francisville, the first town inland.
39:57The houses are all empty.
39:59I called and knocked in vain.
40:01It was the abode of death alone.
40:04Finally I reached the home of Mr. Knobling.
40:06He lent me his horse and I went off at a gallop.
40:10The plantation where Lucy worked was 15 miles inland.
40:13He rode the horse through the night, he lost his way.
40:16The first glimpse of dawn set me on my road at six o'clock.
40:19I was about to rejoin my wife.
40:21I was in the woods, the woods of Louisiana.
40:25My heart was bursting with joy.
40:28He went to his wife's apartment.
40:30The door was open.
40:31She was already up and teaching a student at the piano.
40:36I pronounced her name gently.
40:38She saw me, and the next moment I held her in my arms.
40:44And then he has this lovely phrase of what happened when they met.
40:48Her emotion was so great, I feared I had acted rashly, but tears relieved our hearts.
40:56Once more we were together.
40:58And after that, with few exceptions, they were together for the rest of their lives.
41:05In 1831, Audubon began publishing his ornithological biography, five volumes that combined observations
41:12about birds with adventures from his life.
41:15He called them episodes.
41:17Some of the episodes were, in fact, tall tales.
41:21He ran out of stories after a while.
41:23You will find letters of his writing back to friends saying, give me some more stories.
41:27And he would then write them up as if they were his experience.
41:31In other words, he was prepared to write what I guess today we'd have to call a fictional memoir.
41:38The ornithological biography did well.
41:40Audubon's reputation was growing.
41:43He was received by President Andrew Jackson in the White House.
41:47One review called the first 49 plates of The Birds of America the most magnificent work
41:52of its kind in any country.
41:54But criticism from Philadelphia escalated.
41:58George Ord was especially vitriolic.
42:01Ord, he was continually criticizing Audubon's accuracy.
42:05He would find fault with individual plates.
42:08He would find fault with text and wrote these scurrilous remarks in the margins of ornithological
42:14biography, criticizing, ridiculing, belittling everything that Audubon had done.
42:21All my inquiries have one result, Ord wrote.
42:24He is a well-meaning sort of man, though a great liar.
42:29One of the ironies of this story is that in the Academy's library today, the portrait
42:33of George Ord is doomed to forever look down upon the double elephant folio that the Academy
42:39bought directly from Audubon.
42:43Audubon's obsessive relationship with the birds reached a peak in the winter of 1833
42:48when he bought a live golden eagle.
42:52Audubon had this eagle.
42:53It was in very good shape, so he was trying to figure out a way to kill it without destroying
42:56its feathers in any way.
42:58So he decided he was going to smoke it to death.
43:01And he put it in a cage and covered it up with blankets and put charcoal and allowed
43:06it to smoke.
43:07And when he lifted up the cloth, the thing would stare at him.
43:11It was still alive.
43:12It was perfectly okay.
43:13So then he thought, well, what am I going to do?
43:14So he added sulfur to the flames and the smoke and made this insufferable stench that stunk
43:20up the whole house and covered it over again, went away for, I don't know, 12 hours.
43:26Came back, lifted up the thing, the eagle's still staring at him, still perfectly okay.
43:30So he said he was starting to feel, as he said, less charitable towards the eagle at
43:34this point and figures out that he just has to kill it.
43:38So he gets a long metal pin and pierces its heart and it falls off the perch dead.
43:44He starts to paint it and he had what he called a spasmodic affection, some sort of
43:49fit and was ill, collapsed and almost died, he said.
43:54So he said, this painting almost cost me my life.
43:57And you look at that image today and you can see every vein on every feather and you can
44:02see the emotion in that bird's eye.
44:06Its wings are compressed and it's flying upwards through the air and it's got a hair in its
44:11talon with a claw through its eye.
44:16Audubon's original painting of the golden eagle, there is a log that goes from crag
44:21to crag, it's a small bridge.
44:23There's a little figure on there, a little human figure going across it and it's Audubon.
44:27It's a self-portrait that he put into that painting.
44:31It's very rare for Audubon to do a picture of a human at all and certainly to do a picture
44:36of himself.
44:37Here's the heroic huntsman risking life and limb for science, for art and for America.
44:44Audubon also had the guts to show the effects of human violence.
44:49The greater black-backed gull, they painted it as shot.
44:54Two common golden eyes in flight, one of them has been shot.
45:00Audubon shows an Eskimo curly lying dead while its mate looks at it and it's darkly prophetic
45:06because the bird's extinct now, wiped out by hunters.
45:10Interestingly, in some of those violent prints, it really affects the price of the print.
45:16The general buying public doesn't like the violent prints quite as much.
45:25The natural world, as anyone knows who's watched it closely even in their backyards, is a dark
45:30and bloody ground and I think that's why his work has survived all these years because
45:36it has that sense of the real deep complexity of the natural world.
45:42For the next 13 years, Audubon traveled to the edges of America and beyond looking for
45:47new birds, to Florida, the dry Tortugas, Texas, up the Missouri, Maine, Labrador, seeing more
45:56of his adopted country than anyone alive.
46:00In Labrador, Audubon saw a pile of seal carcasses killed by hunters, 1,500 huge mammals rotting
46:08and stinking.
46:10He watched as men stole wild eggs by the thousand from seabird colonies.
46:15Some 400,000 eggs were stolen in just two months.
46:20North America, he feared, would soon become like England, stripped of its natural resources.
46:28Nature herself seems perishing.
46:31When no more fish, no more game, no more birds exist on her hills, along her coasts and in
46:37her rivers, then she will be abandoned and deserted like a worn out field.
46:43He saw the decline of some species before his eyes and the vast slaughters that took
46:49place and the vast collecting of eggs that would wipe out a species almost in a couple
46:55generations.
46:56He began to be very concerned for these losses.
47:01On June 20, 1838, Robert Havell, Jr. finished printing the fourth and last volume of The
47:08Birds of America.
47:10Done.
47:12Four hundred thirty-five plates, 497 species, 1,065 individual figures of birds.
47:21Audubon was 53 years old.
47:24He spent a good chunk of his adult life, 20 years total, working on the double elephant
47:29folio.
47:30But at the end of it, he never really made any money on the double elephant folio, those
47:36huge bird paintings.
47:38And beginning in 1840, he and his sons began to reduce the size of their drawings and publish
47:43them as the octavo version of The Birds of America.
47:47They ended up selling about 1,200 copies, unbound.
47:52The copies cost $100 a piece.
47:54And it was Audubon's economic salvation.
47:57The octavo edition, in seven volumes, was one of the most successful subscription books
48:03of the 19th century.
48:05As a result of the production of the octavo edition, the Audubons made in modern dollars
48:11about a million dollars.
48:13They bought an acreage on the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan Island.
48:20They built a beautiful house there with porches and a studio for Audubon's work.
48:26Now that he'd done all the birds, Audubon decided to paint the mammals of North America.
48:32But his body was beginning to fail him.
48:34He had lost most of his teeth, which must have been a terrible burden for him.
48:39Here was a man who used to live on wild venison steak out in the forest, and now living on
48:46toast soaked in milk, what a comedown.
48:50His life had changed, and America had changed.
48:54For three years, the naturalist worked feverishly on the mammals.
48:58But his eyesight began to fail.
49:01His son John quietly took over the painting.
49:04Their book about the North American mammals was a huge success.
49:09But at 60 years of age, Audubon began slipping into senility.
49:13Alas, I have only the material part of my old friend, all mind being gone.
49:22It is melancholy to me to see him.
49:25I am obliged to believe he feels no pain, to be reconciled to such a sad change.
49:32By January of 1851, he was close to death.
49:38His brother-in-law, Will Bakewell, whom he had hunted ducks with on Long Pond outside
49:44of Henderson, Kentucky when they were both young, came to visit.
49:48And Audubon was sitting on a park bench looking out over the river and hadn't spoken to anybody
49:53in a long time, or even recognized anybody.
49:55Audubon looked at him, and something went on behind his eyes, and he said, Billy, let's
50:03get our guns and go down to Long Pond and shoot some ducks.
50:08Those were his last words.
50:11He died in his bed with his family around him in January of that year.
50:17He was buried in Trinity Churchyard, close to his last home on the Hudson River.
50:23John James Audubon had lived 65 years.
50:28Lucy Audubon outlived her husband, her sons, and her daughter's-in-law.
50:33She also outlived her fortune.
50:36For a while, she tutored children in her home, but it wasn't enough.
50:42She sold off Audubon's original watercolors, then the copper plates.
50:49When she died, she was destitute.
50:58But Audubon's obsessive quest to show American nature to the world did produce another kind
51:03of legacy.
51:05Decades after his death, the egrets and herons he loved were being hunted down by the thousand
51:10to decorate women's hats.
51:13The response was the first organization dedicated to the protection of American wildlife, the
51:19Audubon Society.
51:21It's ironic that the National Audubon Society is named after John James Audubon when he
51:26was a man who killed literally thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of birds during
51:30his lifetime.
51:31Eventually, Audubon had a change of heart, and he was one of the very first in America
51:36or anywhere in the world to see that was going to be a problem.
51:40And so it's really quite fitting, I suppose, that the Audubon Society should be named in
51:43his honor.
51:45Audubon's legacy that he's left us is a record of America as it was in the early days.
51:55We see glimpses of plantations with slave cottages.
52:03We see the skyline of Charleston, South Carolina.
52:09We see birds that are gone from our landscape.
52:14And he's given us this legacy of what America was in the wildness of our country.
52:21In health and in sickness, in adversity and prosperity, in summer and winter, amidst the
52:27cheers of friends and the scowls of foes, I have depicted the birds of America.
52:34Now you may well imagine how happy I am at this moment when I find my journeys all finished,
52:40my anxieties vanished, my mission accomplished.
53:05To learn more about John James Audubon, visit PBS.org.
53:11John James Audubon, drawn from nature, is available on DVD for $24.95 plus shipping.
53:19To order, call 1-800-336-1917.