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 the artistic and scientific trajectory of his life. The recurring conflict he frequently describes between “peremptory calls of … necessary business” and his more pleasurable “thoughts of birds” requires reading with some measure of caution, if not skepticism.
When it came to taking care of business, he tended to depict himself as inconsistent, impatient, and very easily distracted, sometimes making bad decisions, sometimes simply not caring enough to do the work before him. He wrote that he reveled in the delightful diversions of his business trips, which gave him ample opportunities to track down birds while he should have been looking after his merchandise: “Were I here to tell you that once, when travelling, and driving several horses before me laden with goods and dollars, I lost sight of the pack-saddles, and the cash they bore, to watch the motions of a warbler, I should repeat occurrences that happened a hundred times and more in those days.”7 Written some years after the fact in “Myself,” Audubon’s autobiographical sketch for his sons, this frank confession of failure—what might be called a form of professional attention deficit—did not go on to drive home a fatherly lesson about the need for better commitment to commercial affairs. Instead, Audubon drew a contrast between his fascination with birds and his indifference, even disdain, for day-to-day business.
Just as Audubon used various written accounts of his life—particularly the autobiographical “Myself” but other briefer passages throughout Ornithological Biography as well—to complicate, at times even obfuscate, the details of his origins, so, too, did he use his writings to underscore his distaste for, and ultimate failure in, the world of commerce. In the more than two decades between first arriving in the United States in 1803 and then departing for Great Britain in 1826, to devote himself fully to the production of The Birds of America, Audubon did indeed have his financial ups and downs. He did well enough in his financial affairs to be able to acquire considerable property—both land and enslaved human beings—to create a comfortable existence, and then he lost essentially everything in the Panic of 1819.8 The failure was real, and the distaste no doubt just as real.
His later portrayal of his struggles in those years can sometimes appear to be a near-parable about one man’s high-minded pursuit of art and science within the less lofty economic context of American society. The story is hardly that simple, though. In an era of ever-expanding economic activity in America, Audubon tried his hand at enough entrepreneurial enterprises to seem just as energetic and resilient as the next small-scale capitalist, and if he turned out to run up against financial failure at one point, so, too, did thousands of others. The point is not to declare his business narrative altogether true or false, but to be aware of the always self-conscious construction of the image he sought to offer the world. Audubon became a self-made man in more ways than one.
The Birds and the Beauty of Mill Grove
Arriving at his father’s farm in the autumn of 1803, Audubon alighted in an ornithologically fortunate spot. Situated along Perkiomen Creek just before it flows into a bend in the Schuylkill River, about twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia and less than a hundred miles east of the Kittatinny Ridge, Mill Grove lay within a major American flyway. According to a leading modern-day naturalist, the Kittatinny region is “one of the world’s most famous migration corridors,” a true “birding paradise” now, and probably even more so back in Audubon’s day.9 Contemporary observers certainly celebrated the avian abundance of eastern Pennsylvania. William Bartram, whose 1791 Travels became one of the best works of natural history in the new nation, wrote about bird migrations through Pennsylvania, taking happy note of “those beautiful creatures, which annually people and harmonise our forests and groves, in the spring and summer seasons.”10 From his professorial post at the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Smith Barton likewise studied the multitudes of birds that passed within eighty miles of Philadelphia, from the rarely seen “Occasional Visitants,” such as the Great White Owl (or Snowy Owl), to the more regular arrivals of “Passeres,” none more numerous than the massive flocks of Passenger Pigeons. Barton attributed part of the attraction to the region’s rural areas, where “the hand of man, by clearing and by cultivating the surface of the earth, contributes essentially to the greater uniformity in the temperature of climates,” thus making the environment more inviting to migrants. In turn, the annual migrations also influenced human behavior. He pointed, for instance, to the Pewee, “one of the earliest Spring birds of passage,” typically arriving in the vicinity in mid-March: “We have seldom hard frosts after the arrival of this bird, which seems to give a pretty confident assurance to the farmer, that he may very soon begin to open the ground and plant.”11
Figure 1. Mill Grove Farm, Perkiomen Creek, Pennsylvania, by Thomas Birch, ca. 1820. Oil on wood panel, 16 1/4 x 24 3/8 in. Object #1946.161. New-York Historical Society.
Mill Grove thus provided the perfect place for a bird-conscious boy like Audubon. He seemed little inclined to worry much about the seasonal call to “open the ground and plant,” leaving most of the agricultural concerns to the farm’s tenant, William Thomas, and his family. Instead, Audubon admitted that living in this new place liberated him and allowed him to indulge in all the engaging activities he had enjoyed back in France: “Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment,” he wrote; “cares I knew not, and cared naught about them.”12
He did get to know the neighbors, and he came to care quite a bit about one of them, the young
