Cole and Durand came up the harder way. Born into middling backgrounds at best, both of them the sons of merchant-tradesmen, neither had the opportunity to cross the Atlantic for artistic training. Instead, they learned their trade by becoming itinerant artists, slogging along the path of other painters who populated the broader base of the pyramid of American art, most of whom never made it to the loftier reaches of the American art world, such as it was. Itinerants catered to the rising aspirations of clients in the middling range of society, more ordinary folk who nonetheless had the wherewithal to pay for a “correct likeness”—even if the likeness turned out to be not exactly correct. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the demand for personal pictures grew rapidly as a form of consumption in a commercially expansive society, and itinerant artists carried their brushes from town to town, giving people the images—and emblems of status—they wanted. Largely self-taught, relying more on design books and simple observation than on a formal training, these artist-entrepreneurs did thousands of portraits of individuals, family groups, and sometimes even prized livestock, creating affordable artwork destined to hang on the walls of a family’s parlor rather in the staircase of a grand estate or halls of a gallery. They gave their sitters something of vernacular value, and then they moved on to do the same for people in the next town.2
Cole and Durand lived the life of the itinerant painter for a while, but both eventually turned their artistic attention to the American landscape and, equally important, attracted the attention of a prominent patron. John Trumbull, the well-born and successful artist, became a valuable advocate for both, helping them attain commissions from wealthy clients, members of the emerging American elite who would willingly pay for a painter’s artistry—sometimes if only to satisfy their own vanity. Patronage had a price, and their clients quite often dictated the tone, if not the actual content, of their paintings: In a time of increasing urbanization and industrialization, many patrons preferred images of romantic, even nostalgic, nationalism, paintings of a past American landscape that could be eternally preserved on canvas. Cole and Durand both became famous and prosperous as the twin pillars of the Hudson River School, but they sometimes felt their talents constrained, even squandered, by having to pander to the demands of aristocratic clients who commissioned the work and took it as their right to influence its execution.3
Audubon, like Cole and Durand, would work his way upward while still following a career path very much of his own making. Along the way, he would have to undertake the kinds of ad hoc tasks that had become common among America’s itinerant artists—making quick and cheap portraits, painting signs, or teaching art classes—but only as a financial means to a larger artistic end. Audubon never quite used the term “struggling artist” to describe himself, but he did indeed struggle, usually without much help from anyone else. Audubon came from a reasonably prosperous family, and even though he claimed (almost certainly falsely) to have studied with the great French painter Jacques-Louis David, his background in France did little for his art career in America. Friends of his father and, later, father-in-law proved to be useful allies, but none of them became as committed a champion as John Trumbull, much less a financially supportive patron of Audubon’s artistic ambitions. Perhaps the best one can say is that Audubon developed such a single-minded dedication to one single task—drawing birds—that he did not have to bow to the artistic expectations or a priori demands of a patron. To be sure, he would spend an enormous amount of time and trouble trying to track down people wealthy enough to pay for his “Great Work,” but he did so in pursuit of subscriptions, not commissions. For better or worse, he had no one telling him what to do, and he could follow his own passion.
We now know the remarkable result. In strictly aesthetic terms, he became a better bird artist than anyone else had ever been: The proof is in the pictures. Moreover, no one in nineteenth-century America so successfully combined artistic and scientific ambition or did more to bring nature to the nation. Audubon’s birds became emblematic of the fusion of art and science in antebellum American culture.
The Persistent Calling of Birds
Still, for all the fame and lasting success of Audubon’s astounding lifetime achievement, The Birds of America, there remains a basic question that has to be asked: Why did he do it? Why did he devote the better part of his adult life to producing a huge book about every bird known in North America? How sensible would it be, after all, to make one’s calling out of wandering through the woods or along the riverbanks and seashores, looking for birds, shooting them, arranging their decomposing carcasses into lifelike poses, drawing the dead birds, filling in the pictures with paint, working with an engraver and a publisher to make a big and expensive book, and then wandering around some more, essentially from door to door, to try to sell the book to skeptical customers? All sorts of people, from the middling ranks to the upper reaches of society, wanted individual and family portraits, especially in the era before photography made accurate likenesses readily available. Socially prominent patrons might also pay quite well to commission a large landscape, especially if they could exert enough influence over the artist to shape the painting to their vision of a romanticized past. Many devotees of natural history would also pay for one-off paintings of plants and animals—but a whole collection of birds? Of all the many ways a young man might try to make a good living in the energetic but often erratic economy of the early American republic—and as we shall see, Audubon tried more than a few—making and marketing an oversized book of bird pictures might have seemed among the least likely paths to success, an almost crazy career choice even for an artist. What sort of person would devote his life to such a challenging and, at the outset, financially unpromising pursuit?
In Audubon’s own account of his life, the answer became clear: someone whose passion began to overshadow any sort of profession, until eventually the two merged into one. It is difficult to say exactly when Audubon determined that painting birds would become his life’s work. He began drawing them as a young boy in France, but he apparently destroyed much of that early work. It was only when he came to the United States, he wrote, that he resolved “to draw each individual of its natural size and colouring,” and he dated “the real beginning of my present collection, and observations of the habits of some of these birds, as far back as 1805.”4 He claimed to have been driven by what he called an “innate desire” to know and depict the birds in this new land, an impulse that gripped him as soon as he landed on American shores and that propelled him throughout the rest of his life. Still, writing some three decades later, in the last volume of Ornithological Biography, he admitted that had anyone suggested at the outset that he would ever complete “a work comprising five hundred species of birds of the United States and British America, I should have smiled and shaken my head.”5
He began his artistic career long before it could even be called a career, in fact, first drawing birds as a part-time pastime, in “all that portion generally called leisure,” doing something he wanted to do, perhaps had to do, while he was doing something else—trying to make a go of his father’s farm, running his own store and steam mill, or painting portraits and doing the other sorts of artistic hackwork he hated. Sometimes, he complained, something else got in the way of the one thing he liked most of all: “I have often been forced to put aside for a while even the thoughts of birds, or the pleasures I have felt in watching their movement, and likewise to their sweet melodies, to attend more closely to the peremptory calls of other necessary business.”6 Whatever his other responsibilities, though, Audubon could not help heeding the call of those “sweet melodies,” and the art and science of birds would become his sole and certainly most necessary business—with, to be sure, a series of personal and professional missteps that put his eventual success in much sharper contrast.
That contrast, though, stands as an important part of Audubon’s life story, an almost necessary element in the larger narrative he created about