John James Audubon (1785 – 1851)

There are probably no bird artists in North America who have not been asked by someone if they are following in the footsteps of Audubon. The answer is always a rather resounding “no”.

As a very young child I was given a book with reproductions of a few of his plates from his famous early series of plates showing all the birds of North American he could locate and called The Birds of America (1827 – 1839), life size, in colour, usually including at least some aspect of their habitat, vegetation accurately rendered. The cover was his Snowy Egret.  I had never seen any egrets at that age, but even then, it looked not quite right in some way I could not define. Some of the paintings inside were beautiful images, or designs, such as the Pileated Woodpeckers, or the Wood Ducks, but with a few exceptions, such as the Barn Swallow, or the Carolina Parakeets (which, although the species was extinct, did look quite like the caged parakeets I had seen) the poses were often rather contrived-looking, and in some cases almost grotesquely so. Apparently his methodology included shooting a bird, running wires through it and bending it into a suitable pose, and then putting it against a grid so that could reproduce the outline, a rather crude version of the camera lucida and other pre-camera methods of projecting an image onto a drawing surface where it could be traced with fidelity at least somewhat independent of drawing skills. Unfortunately, for all that Audubon made many very valid primary wildlife observations and discoveries, his paintings too often did not resemble the birds I was seeing even at a tender age, and the older I grew the less I wanted to draw like Audubon, notwithstanding the sheer magnificence of the final result as art, as distinct from the genre of bird art.

Only decades later did I learn that Audubon had various character flaws, such as racist views and a propensity to invent species of birds that did not exist or take credit where it was less than due, that diminish his reputation. But the bottom line is that unlike so many other artists listed here, Audubon’s work did not really influence my own in any significant way, with one possible exception. For the most part the patterns of plumage he portrayed were accurate, and so for spread wings and tails I would sometimes check out what he showed, although that kind of visual information is increasingly easy to find from other sources.