land is very fertile”), the inhabitants (“very accommodating”), and the houses (“some of them are very prettily laid out indeed”). Still, she confessed to being “very sorry there is no library here or book store of any kind for I have very few of my own and as Mr. Audubon is constantly at the store, I should often enjoy a book very much whilst I am alone.”33
Being alone became a big part of the story of Lucy’s life. As she would soon find out, her husband’s habit of being “constantly at the store” would quickly dissipate, and he would spend as much time thinking about birds as business. Over the coming years, in fact, birds would become his business, and in pursuit of that business he would leave her alone for long stretches of time, most notably a three-year stint in England, 1826–1829, to begin producing The Birds of America. In the early years of their marriage, though, Audubon and Lucy would be together enough to have four children: two boys, Victor Gifford (born 1809) and John Woodhouse (born 1812), both of whom would turn out to be important assistants in their father’s work; and two girls, Lucy (born 1815) and Rose (born 1819), both of whom died in infancy. Beyond being a mother, though, Lucy’s main role in life eventually meant being a quiet contributor to the Great Work that defined Audubon’s career and truly became a family business. Before any of that would happen, however, she had to adjust, many times over, to being married to a man whose head so often seemed to be in the clouds, his eyes typically turned to the tops of trees. Like Audubon’s father, Lucy probably never expected her husband to become a bird artist.
She probably also never suspected that his life would become so affected by his first meeting with another—really, the other—bird artist in America.
Louisville Encounter
Every field has its famous, even defining moments, and there’s a much-told Audubon story that merits a place in the apocrypha of early American art and science. The incident in question seems so implausible and yet so perfect that no one would dare have the gall to invent it completely—not even Audubon himself. And because the story comes from two sources, not just Audubon but the other main character as well, we might well assume it actually happened, even if not exactly as it has been told by either of them. Perhaps the best thing to say is that the story is close to being true, and it points to larger truths beyond the specific narrative details.
Audubon tells it this way: “One fair morning” in March 1810, he writes, he happened to be working behind the counter of the Audubon-Rozier store in Louisville, when “I was surprised by the sudden entrance into our counting-room of Mr. Alexander Wilson, the celebrated author of the ‘American Ornithology.’” From the beginning, the story sets up a much-repeated contrast, with Audubon trying to take care of business but being distracted by birds or, in this case, pictures of birds. When Audubon took a look at Wilson’s work, he saw something that filled his artist’s eye with admiration, perhaps even envy—two large, leather-bound books with a total of eighteen engraved, hand-colored plates and over three hundred pages of accompanying text, volumes that were physically impressive in heft and visually striking in appearance.34
In those first few lines of his narrative, though, Audubon took quite a leap ahead, looking considerably beyond the time frame of the encounter at hand. “Celebrated author” would have been a bit of a stretch for Wilson, at least at the time he showed up in Audubon’s store. A gruff and grumbling Scotsman who had worked as a weaver and then as a political activist and largely unsuccessful poet in his native Scotland, Wilson had failed at essentially everything he had attempted. Feeling financially frustrated and politically persecuted in Scotland, he left for the United States in 1794, but the new land of opportunity didn’t seem to help. He faced yet another string of occupational failures, from weaving to day labor, the final straw being teaching in a school in Gray’s Ferry, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. Wilson had worked as a schoolteacher before, and he approached this new post with something less than pedagogical enthusiasm: “I shall recommence that painful profession once more with the same gloomy, sullen resignation that a prisoner re-enters his dungeon or a malefactor mounts the scaffold,” he wrote to a friend, offering a prediction that this new position would not turn out to be a success.35 It didn’t.
While in the Philadelphia area, however, Wilson had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of several of the city’s prominent men—most usefully the naturalist William Bartram and the engraver Alexander Lawson—who became allies, both personally and financially, in encouraging him to try his hand at art. Even sympathetic friends might reasonably have surmised that, for a forlorn loser like Wilson, there seemed precious little left. Still, with some helpful lessons under Bartram’s guidance, Wilson finally decided upon his life’s true (and final) calling: “I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a collection of all the birds in this part of North America,” he declared. That collection would eventually become the nine-volume compendium of bird drawings and written descriptions, American Ornithology (1808–1814).36 On the first page of the first volume, Wilson made the high-minded declaration that he wanted only to “draw the attention of my fellow-citizens … to a contemplation of the grandeur, harmony, and wonderful variety of Nature,” adding that “lucrative views have nothing to do in the business.”37
Figure 2. Portrait of Alexander Wilson, probably painted by Thomas Sully, 1809–1813. Oil on wood, 23 1/4 x 22 inches. American Philosophical Society, gift of Dr. Nathaniel Chapman, 1822.
Wilson certainly turned out to be right about the “lucrative” part. Putting behind him the comparative comfort and support he enjoyed in Philadelphia, he started stumping the country off and on for a couple of years, lugging around examples of his work to show potential customers in order to secure subscriptions to his larger but still incomplete project. (At the time Wilson happened to come to Louisville, only the first volumes had begun to appear in print, in a limited edition of two hundred copies.) A subscriber to American Ornithology would be expected to come up with $120 for the full work, a hefty sum that only prosperous individuals and institutions could afford, and even many of them seemed disinclined to pay the price. In one instance, Wilson complained, a potential purchaser of American Ornithology “turned over a few leaves very carelessly; asked some trifling questions; and then threw the book down, saying—I don’t intend to give an hundred and twenty dollars for the knowledge of birds!” After picking up his sample volumes and heading for the door, Wilson later grumbled that if “science depended on such animals as these, the very name would ere now have been extinct.”38 After suffering a depressing share of such insults and indifference, Wilson came to Louisville with no celebrity billing, just four letters of introduction that he hoped would open the doors of “all the characters likely to subscribe” and, most important, with the two volumes of his bird drawings, which he wearily lay on the counter in Audubon’s store.39
As Audubon later related the opening moments of their meeting, Wilson’s work seemed almost too good to be true and too good to pass up—at least at first viewing. Even though he could hardly afford to do so, Audubon was about to sign his name to the subscription list when, just then, his partner, Rozier, stopped him. After looking at Wilson’s bird images, Rozier whispered to Audubon (in French, their common tongue) that Audubon’s own drawings were “certainly far better” and that Audubon himself was just as good as Wilson: “You must know as much of the habits of American birds as this gentleman.” A bit awkwardly and perhaps a bit too suddenly, Audubon backed away from his decision to subscribe to Wilson’s work. Wilson seemed annoyed, Audubon continued, but he asked to see Audubon’s own images, and Audubon laid a portfolio of his own drawings before his visitor. Wilson found it hard to believe that anyone else had also begun the same sort of work on birds, and, like any suddenly insecure author, he asked Audubon if he planned to publish his images. When Audubon said no, Wilson then asked if he could borrow some of Audubon’s drawings, and Audubon said yes. Audubon also suggested the possibility of an artistic collaboration, or at least collegial
