John James Audubon

John James Audubon: Life-Sized and Larger than Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m052VV18wiM

Images:
1. John James Audubon, Self-portrait, 1822. Oil on canvas - 12 one half x 10 inches
2. 1840 John James Audubon, Mississippi Kite, Original Print from the First Edition of 'Birds of America' 30 x 24.
3. John James Audubon, White Wolf, Original Print from 'Mammals of North America' 21 inches x 25 inches.
4. 1840 John James Audubon, Sharp-Shinned Hawk, Original Print from the First Edition of 'Birds of America' 23.5 x 18.5.

Background from {[https://www.incollect.com/articles/john-james-audubon-portraitist]}
John James Audubon, Portraitist
Before John James Audubon (1785–1851) achieved international fame and financial success with the publication of his “double elephant folio” The Birds of America (1827–1837) and the smaller, but even more successful, octavo edition of that book a few years later, he struggled to make ends meet. He failed in several business ventures, and even spent a few weeks in debtors’ prison for his unpaid bills. During these lean years, he managed to generate a modest income by giving art lessons and making pencil, charcoal, chalk and oil portraits. Human portraiture was never something he particularly enjoyed, but the surviving examples of his work suggest that it might have given him a very different artistic reputation had he chosen to make it the focus of his career.
The illegitimate son of a French sea captain, born in Haiti and raised in France, Audubon came to America in 1803 to avoid being drafted into Napoleon’s army. He brought with him a life-long love of birds and an innate talent for capturing their appearance on paper (Fig. 1). While living at Mill Grove, a property owned by his father twenty miles west of Philadelphia, he met and married his near neighbor, Lucy Bakewell, with whom he had two sons and two daughters, only the first two of whom lived to maturity. Within months of their wedding, the young couple moved south to Louisville, Kentucky, where Audubon was eager to try his hand at business.

A number of poor investments, and one failed venture after another put the Audubons in financial distress, forcing the quickly-Americanizing Frenchman to generate a meager income through odd jobs. He gave lessons in drawing, dancing, music, and fencing. He earned additional money by making chalk and pencil drawings of individuals in the wealthy families he met through the introduction of friends and his own initiative. By capitalizing on what he called “my little talents” in this way, he was able to make between five and twenty-five dollars per portrait. In some cases, he made the portraits in exchange for the hospitality of his sitters; in other cases, through barter for needed goods and services. The likenesses of his brothers-in-law Nicholas Augustus Berthoud and Thomas Woodhouse Bakewell (Figs. 2 and 3), may have been undertaken without charge.
Some of Audubon’s money-making forays put stress on his marriage by keeping him away from his family for weeks and sometimes months at a time. His letters to Lucy during this period describing the charms of his female pupils and sitters—including one who requested her portrait be painted as a nude—could not have helped. The long-suffering Lucy, busy raising their two sons, added to the family’s revenue when she could by giving lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic, and music to the children of others.

Although Audubon preferred painting birds to people, he was remarkably adept at portraiture when the circumstances required. As his artistic reputation grew, he was called upon to make posthumous portraits or to capture the likenesses of people at the ends of their lives. “I was sent for four miles in the country, to take likenesses of persons on their death-beds,” he recalled in his memoirs, “and so high did my reputation suddenly rise, as the best delineator of heads in that vicinity, that a clergyman residing in Louisville … had his dead child disinterred, to procure a fac-simile of his face.”  It was a grim profession, and not one Audubon was eager to pursue, but it did help tide him over until his self-financed bird book project could bear fruit.
Because his ornithological illustrations have much more universal appeal, and because most of the chalk and pencil portraits he made have remained in private hands, his ability as a bird painter has dominated his reputation, while his role as a painter of human portraits is relatively little known. Based on references in his letters and journals, it is estimated that Audubon made more than one hundred human portraits between 1819 and 1826. He reports doing as many as fifty in 1821, and earning $220 in one ten-day period alone. Unfortunately, we know the whereabouts of less than a third of his portraits today.

The chalk portrait that is most frequently reproduced is the one he made of himself in 1826 in which he described himself as “almost happy” (Fig. 4). The other portraits we know about represent his family, friends, and the acquaintances he made in the South and Mid-West, especially during his time in or near Louisville, Kentucky, Natchez, Mississippi, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

In 1821, Audubon wrote his wife to report on his success as an art teacher and portraitist in New Orleans. “There are men here of talents in my line of focus who Draw and paint beautifully,” he wrote Lucy, “yet I am preferred….I have, I believe, not one adversary [competitor] in America.”  Part of this self-aggrandizement was due to Audubon’s ego and his wish to reassure Lucy that he could support her and their growing family, but part of it was also due to his lack of familiarity with the greater artistic community within the United States. He had not yet met John Vanderlyn, who would later use him as the model for his portrait of President Andrew Johnson, or Thomas Sully, who would take him under his wing in Philadelphia in 1824. Other artists like Charles Willson Peale, and his son Rembrandt were painting masterful portraits of the leading figures in the new Republic up and down the East Coast at a time when Audubon was living hand-to-mouth on the country’s frontier. Fortunately for him, most of his patrons in Louisville, Natchez, New Orleans, and Cincinnati had little or no contact with other artists, and so considered Audubon a painter without equal.

It is unknown how Audubon taught himself to create his elegant portraits in pencil and chalk. In his memoirs, and when he was trying to promote his talents as a portraitist, he claimed to have received his artistic training from the renowned French painter Jacques Louis David (1748–1825), court painter to both Louis XVI and Napoleon, but there is no evidence to support this claim. It is possible that he was exposed to some of David’s work—and the work of other, equally talented European painters—either before traveling to America in 1803, or during his year-long return trip to France in 1805—but how much they influenced his artistic activity is hard to say.

In the United States he may have been influenced by the silhouettes cut by Moses Williams and others at Charles Willson Peale’s museum in Philadelphia, or the masterful black and white profiles and related prints of distinguished Americans by his French compatriot Charles Balthasar Julien Fevret de St. Mémin (1770–1852). Audubon’s earliest known portraits have the same strict profile compositions as these (Figs. 2, 5, 6, and 7). In time, he added strength and character to his subjects’ depictions by giving their faces a three-quarter angle view (Figs. 8–11). In his most powerful portraits, such as that of John Baptiste Bossier of 1821 (Fig.12), and Frederic Huidekoper three years later, his subjects look back and seem to make direct eye contact with the viewer. More often, his subjects have a distant stare, as if they are contemplating the world beyond what we can see.
In the autumn of 1822 Audubon met an itinerant portrait painter named John Steen from whom he received some basic instruction in painting in oils. For a brief period they formed a portrait-painting partnership. Despite his success with his chalk and pencil portraits, Audubon believed that oils were a more prestigious and more lucrative medium in which to work; he also thought the pencil and chalk drawings he had been making at such a steady clip were beginning to take a toll on his eyesight. “Although I now am the maker [of the] very best portraits [in chalk],” he wrote to Lucy in May 1821, “I would like to paint portraits in oil. I am now afraid that Black Chalk injures my Eyes that are always sore.”  With the exception of an oil painting he made of himself shortly after receiving Steen’s instruction (Fig. 13), and a few others he made of his family at the same time (Fig.14). Audubon was not particularly adept in this medium. His pencil, chalk and charcoal portraits remain his strongest. Throughout his life, as he directed most of his artistic energies to birds, the medium with which he was most comfortable was watercolor, and yet, interestingly, there are no known portraits by Audubon that were painted in watercolor.

Mindful of the help his portrait painting had provided him during challenging times, Audubon asked Thomas Sully to give him instructions in oil painting when he was in Philadelphia in 1824. Sully agreed to do so in exchange for Audubon teaching his daughter, Sarah, how to paint with pastels and watercolor. By this time, however, Audubon was already so invested in painting birds for his great book on the subject that he was reluctant to turn back to portraiture in a meaningful way. After 1824, his portraits of people are few and far between. The portraits by Audubon that survive hint at what he might have been able to achieve had he chosen people over birds as his favorite subjects.

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1. Victor Gifford (1809–1860), John Woodhouse (1812–1862), Lucy (1815–17), and Rose (1819–1820).
2. Letter from J. J. Audubon to Lucy Audubon, quoted in Stanley Clisby Arthur, Audubon: An Intimate Life of The American Woodsman (New Orleans: Harmanson, 1937), 183.
3. J. J. Audubon, “Myself,” published in: Maria R. Audubon, Ed, Audubon and His Journals, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897, Vol. 1, 36; also quoted in Alexander B. Adams, John James Audubon (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 186–187.
4. Anette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. Eds., John James Audubon The Watercolors for The Birds of America (New York: Villard Books, Random House for the New York Historical Society, 1993), 70. J. F. McDermott speculated that Audubon could have drawn “several hundred” such portraits between 1819 and 1826. See McDermott, “Likeness by Audubon,” Antiques (June 1955): 501.
5. In a journal entry of October 25, 1821, Audubon noted that he had done 50 portraits since October 12, 1820. See Edward H. Dwight, Audubon Watercolors and Drawings (Utica NY: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1965), 27. For the amount he earned, see William Souder, Under A Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of The Birds of America (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2014), 178–179.
6. Letter from J.J. Audubon to Lucy Audubon, from New Orleans, May 24, 1821. H.F. DuPont Winterthur Museum Library, Archive, Col. 170 87X001.
7. Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon The Making of an American (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 214–15.
8. Letter from J.J. Audubon to Lucy Audubon, from New Orleans, May 24, 1821. Winterthur archive Col. 170 87X001.
9. His own self-portrait, at age 37, was painted at Beech Woods, Feliciana Parish, Louisiana in 1822.
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Robert McCracken Peck is Curator of Art and Artifacts and Senior Fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania."
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John James Audubon: The Birds of America (1985)
Documentary portrait of John James Audubon (1785-1851), the famous French painter who lived and worked in America for most of his life and is known primarily for “Birds of America.” This film covers his whole life and offers beautiful shots of many of his paintings as well as location trips to the places in America where he lived and worked (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, among others). There are sequences filmed at the New-York Historical Society. John Wilmerding, then-Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Art, appears on camera to show some of Audubon’s color plates. Narrated by Larry Lewman. Directed by Steve York for the National Gallery of Art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa7975N_jYc&t=664s


Images:
1. Lucy Audubon with her granddaughters Lulu (left) and Hattie (right)
2. 1840 John James Audubon, Prairie Warblers, Original print from the First Edition of 'Birds of America' c. 1840, 25 x 18.jpg
3. John James Audubon - Unidentified artist - Oil on canvas, c. 1841
4. 1843 John James Audubon, Black Winged Hawk, Original Print from 2nd Edition of 'Birds of America' 32 x 23.

Background from {[http://www.thoughtco.com/john-james-audubon-1773656}
John James Audubon
John James Audubon created a masterpiece of American art, a collection of paintings titled Birds of America published in a series of four enormous volumes from 1827 to 1838.
Besides being a remarkable painter, Audubon was a great naturalist, and his visual art and writing helped inspire the conservation movement.

Early Life of James John Audubon
Audubon was born as Jean-Jacques Audubon on April 26, 1785, in the French colony of Santo Domingo, the illegitimate son of a French naval officer and a French chambermaid. After the death of his mother, and a rebellion in Santo Domingo, which became the nation of Haiti, Audubon's father took Jean-Jacques and a sister to live in France.

Audubon Settled in America
In France, Audubon neglected formal studies to spend time in nature, often observing birds. In 1803, when his father became worried that his son would be conscripted into Napoleon's army, Audubon was sent to America. His father had purchased a farm outside Philadelphia, and the 18-year-old Audubon was sent to live on the farm.
Adopting the Americanized name John James, Audubon adapted to America and lived as a country gentleman, hunting, fishing, and indulging in his passion for observing birds. He became engaged to the daughter of a British neighbor, and soon after marrying Lucy Bakewell the young couple left the Audubon farm to venture into the American frontier.

Audubon Failed in Business in America
Audubon tried his luck at various endeavors in Ohio and Kentucky and discovered that he was not suited for the life of business. He later observed that he spent too much time looking at birds to worry about more practical matters.
Audubon devoted considerable time to ventures into the wilderness on which he would shoot birds so he could study and draw them.
A sawmill business Audubon ran in Kentucky failed in 1819, partly due to the widespread financial crisis known as the Panic of 1819. Audubon found himself in serious financial trouble, with a wife and two young sons to support. He was able to find some work in Cincinnati doing crayon portraits, and his wife found work as a teacher.
Audubon traveled down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and was soon followed by his wife and sons. His wife found employment as a teacher and governess, and while Audubon devoted himself to what he saw as his true calling, the painting of birds, his wife managed to support the family.

A Publisher Was Found In England
After failing to interest any American publishers in his ambitious plan to publish a book of paintings of American birds, Audubon sailed to England in 1826. Landing in Liverpool, he managed to impress influential English editors with his portfolio of paintings.
Audubon came to be highly regarded in British society as a natural unschooled genius. With his long hair and rough American clothes, he became something of a celebrity. And for his artistic talent and great knowledge of birds he was named a fellow of the Royal Society, Britain's leading scientific academy.
Audubon eventually met up with an engraver in London, Robert Havell, who agreed to work with him to publish Birds of America.
The resulting book, which became known as the "double elephant folio" edition for the immense size of its pages, was one of the largest books ever published. Each page measured 39.5 inches tall by 29.5 inches wide, so when the book was opened it was more than four feet wide by three feet tall.
To produce the book, Audubon's images were etched on copper plates, and the resulting printed sheets were colored by artists to match Audubon's original paintings.

Birds of America Was a Success
During the production of the book, Audubon returned to the United States twice to collect more bird specimens and sell subscriptions for the book. Eventually, the book was sold to 161 subscribers, who paid $1,000 for what eventually became four volumes. In total, Birds of America contained 435 pages featuring more than 1,000 individual paintings of birds.
After the lavish double-elephant folio edition was finished, Audubon produced a smaller and much more affordable edition which sold very well and brought Audubon and his family a very good income.

Audubon Lived Along the Hudson River
With the success of Birds of America, Audubon purchased a 14-acre estate along the Hudson River north of New York City. He also wrote a book titled Ornithological Biography containing detailed notes and descriptions about the birds which appeared in Birds of America.
Ornithological Biography was another ambitious project, eventually stretching into five volumes. It contained not only material on birds but accounts of Audubon's many travels on the American frontier. He recounted stories about meetings with interesting people like a self-liberated formerly enslaved person and famed frontiersman Daniel Boone.

Audubon Painted Other American Animals
In 1843 Audubon set off on his last great expedition, visiting the western territories of the United States so he could paint American mammals. He traveled from St. Louis to the Dakota territory in the company of buffalo hunters and wrote a book which became known as the Missouri Journal.
Returning to the east, Audubon's health began to decline, and he died at his estate on the Hudson on January 27, 1851.
Audubon's widow sold his original paintings for Birds of America to the New York Historical Society for $2,000. His work has remained popular, having been published in countless books and as prints.
The paintings and writings of John James Audubon helped inspire the conservation movement, and one of the foremost conservation groups, The Audubon Society, was named in his honor.
Editions of Birds of America remain in print to this day, and original copies of the double-elephant folio fetch high prices on the art market. Sets of the original edition of Birds of America have sold for as much as $8 million.

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