Audubon as Artist:

A New Look at The Birds of America 

by Roberta J. M. Olson

Reaktion Books 2024

For over ten years, from 1827 to 1838, the great artist John James Audubon labored to produce his enormous epic, The Birds of America, with its double elephant-sized pages engraved by Robert Havell, and in her sumptuous new book, Audubon as Artist, Roberta Olson not only celebrates that work but also anatomizes it, drawing genealogical, even cladistic connections between Audubon’s famous bird-illustrations and the traditions of Western art that came before him. It’s intriguing to piece together which aspects of those traditions the autodidact Audubon would have cared about or even known about, and Olson, Curator of Drawings Emerita at the New York Historical Society and Professor Emerita of Art History at Wheaton College, here takes full advantage of her book’s larger size and presumably generous illustration budget in order to do just that. Audubon as Artist is amazingly alive with art of all kinds: not only full-page reproductions of many of the 435 plates of Birds of America but also plenty of non-Audubon work, from John Syme’s oddly avian portrait of Audubon from 1826 to John Trumbull’s 1786 work The Death of General Montgomery, which readers see both in the color original and in Johann Frederick Clemens’ widely popular 1798 engraving — from which Audubon did a watercolor copy we no longer have. 

Paging through Olson’s book provides one imagination-stirring juxtaposition after another. Readers will be moving along from one Audubon picture to the next when they’ll encounter on facing pages Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps from 1801 and Audubon’s Golden Eagle from 1833 — and suddenly, maybe for the first time, connections will fire in the imagination. And here, as always, Olson is ready with as much exposition as the connection can support:

It is impossible to know which of the many Neoclassical paintings or portraits by David in the Louvre grabbed Audubon’s attention. However, the most frequently recognized influence from another artist’s work is his Golden Eagle, which dates five years after his Paris sojourn and was inspired in part by David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Known in five versions, the original canvas was in Madrid until 1812, when it was taken to the United States by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, after his abdication as King of Spain, and was hung at Joseph’s Point Breeze estate in Bordentown, New Jersey, near Philadelphia.

Audubon, we’re told, met Joseph in Battery Park in August of 1824, and Joseph’s nephew, Charles-Lucien, was the artist’s friend. These kinds of artistic and personal webworks expand steadily throughout the book, with Olson drawing lines between everything that Audubon might have seen and everybody he might have met. The scholarship is prodigious but unobtrusive; despite the wealth of whip-smart text in this big book, the pictures, very rightly, always speak clearly for themselves. 

Some of what those pictures have to say is grim, of course. Audubon’s Birds of America includes glorious renditions of birds that have since gone extinct, like the Eskimo curlew, the great auk, the Labrador duck, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and, infamously, the passenger pigeon. Audubon himself commented in 1829 on changes he’d seen in just the last twenty years, with “the surplus population of Europe” shipping over to fill the forests and dells he’d tramped as a solitary explorer. The slow shock of it prompted what Olson refers to as his “proto-conservationist awareness,” and it also prompted the creation of the National Audubon Society, although Olson’s volume only very lightly touches on what she calls the “climate of escalating identity politics” that has recently prompted the Society foolishly to reconsider its relationship with its great namesake. 

Of all the countless books that have been written about the man and his work, Audubon as Artist would have delighted Audubon the most, since it highlights not only his own art (in priority over his rocky finances, dreadful dentition, wretched morals when it came to the subject of slavery, unfettered bloodlust when shooting the birds he loved so much, and so on) but also the wide history of artworks that informed his own or challenged it. And best of all: Olson’s decision to include some samples from the unguessable 21st century, smart, brawling murals that perfectly echo Audubon’s celebration of “the fierce beauty of the natural world.” 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News