his”—he did think that Wilson might be willing to print some of his images: “I offered them to him, merely on condition that what I had drawn, or might afterwards draw and send to him, should be mentioned in his work, as coming from my pencil.” Wilson never took him up on the offer, however, and the Scotsman soon left Louisville, “little knowing how much his talents were appreciated in our little town, at least by myself and my friends.” That, at least, was Audubon’s version of the encounter, which he published in the first volume of Ornithological Biography in 1831.40
For his own part, Wilson never wrote much about his visit to Louisville, and he never mentioned Audubon by name in American Ornithology. He did, however, offer a few details in his diary. On March 19, he wrote that he examined Audubon’s drawings, which he pronounced “very good,” and he noted that Audubon had two new birds, “both Motacillae,” or warblers. The following two days he went out shooting, once with Audubon, but he also complained he had “no naturalist to keep me company,” thus excluding Audubon from that category. Finally, he departed the town, giving a very different ending to the story: “I bade adieu to Louisville … but neither received one act of civility … one subscriber, nor one new bird,” he grumped. “Science or literature has not one friend in this place.”41 Neither, apparently, did Wilson, who left town with a bitter taste in his mouth.
And that, after a week, was apparently that. Audubon wrote about seeing Wilson only one more time, during a brief visit Audubon made to Philadelphia in 1811, a polite but chilly-seeming meeting that left Audubon feeling that “my company was not agreeable.” No matter how that second encounter went—or if it happened at all—that was the end of the personal relationship between them.42 Two years later, Wilson was dead, brought down by dysentery and the general debilitations of too much time spent tramping around outdoors, trying to find birds to paint and, perhaps even more difficult, customers to buy his bird paintings.
So the story is told, from both Audubon’s perspective and Wilson’s, neither of which may be absolutely accurate. Wilson’s parting shot at Louisville and its inhabitants might have been sharpened in print by Wilson’s posthumous promoter, George Ord, whose hostility to Audubon, as we shall see, grew to be all but boundless. In turn, Audubon’s more upbeat telling of Wilson’s warm reception in Louisville clearly came in response to Ord’s published account of Wilson’s unhappy departure, thus putting himself in a more positive and hospitable light. (Like Ernest Hemingway’s treatment of F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, Audubon’s description of Wilson in Ornithological Biography underscores an important point: Whoever lives longer gets the last and most self-serving word.) Still, for all the questions and caveats surrounding the competing narratives, the Audubon-Wilson encounter stands as the most famous human sighting in the history of American ornithology, and it invites speculation about the meaning of this remarkable meeting.
First, this unlikely encounter raises a simple but significant question: Was Rozier right? Was Audubon’s work actually better than Wilson’s? It would take a bird-by-bird analysis of the images both men had at the time even to begin to answer that question conclusively, and even then, it would probably be impossible to reach any all-encompassing artistic or ornithological judgment. Still, a one-bird comparison—in this case, of the Belted Kingfisher—can provide a good idea of the talents of the two artists at the time of their Kentucky encounter (see Plates 2 and 3). Wilson’s kingfisher perches in profile in the midst of four other birds, three warblers and a thrush, dominating the picture in both size and prominence.43 The bird’s distinctive markings, particularly the reddish band that identifies it as a female, are sharp and well defined—but perhaps too much so, certainly more so than would be the case on a real bird. Audubon’s kingfisher—drawn in 1808, well before Wilson came into his store, much less into his life—was also a female, but rendered with a better representation of the subtlety and irregularity of the color patterns and the texture of the feathers, especially in the bird’s crest. One might acknowledge, of course, that the materials Audubon used in rendering his kingfisher in 1808—pastel, graphite, and ink—allowed for more subtlety than the final engraved version of Wilson’s image. One might also complain—as some critics indeed have—that both Wilson’s and Audubon’s portrayals of the Belted Kingfisher seem a bit stiff, still adhering to the standard conventions of avian art by presenting the bird in profile and certainly not displaying the often dramatic vivacity that would later come to characterize Audubon’s art.44 Still, if Wilson had even a glance at Audubon’s kingfisher—and it seems highly likely that he did—he would have had good reason to be impressed, perhaps even worried. Audubon had already become a remarkably avid observer and gifted illustrator of birds, and anyone who saw his work would have to take note of his skill. Alexander Wilson certainly must have.45
The artistic comparison, even competition, leads to a second question: What might have happened if the Audubon-Wilson story had had a happier ending? How might the course of American art and science have been affected if Wilson had lived longer and the two had indeed become collaborators, as Audubon said he had suggested? The two men clearly shared a common passion, and the work it required might also have been shared. The attempt to depict every bird in America defined an enormous, almost impossible-seeming agenda, certainly the sort of undertaking that might invite goodwill and a mutually respectful effort, especially in a society that did not yet have well-established science departments in research universities or substantial government funding to provide employment or ensure support. Neither Wilson nor Audubon had the personal financial resources to establish himself as an independent gentleman-naturalist, but both did have seemingly unlimited ambition, unflagging energy, and unmistakable artistic skill.
In the end, Audubon surpassed Wilson enough to claim a degree of celebrity and success that no other American naturalist had ever known—or, arguably, would know since—but he could scarcely see or talk about his own work without taking its measure next to that of Wilson. Throughout his long quest to illustrate all the species that would eventually grace the pages of The Birds of America, Audubon frequently relied on Wilson’s American Ornithology as a ready reference. Even more often, however, he took it as a point of competitive departure, taking posthumous potshots at its author for decades to come.
Wilson’s allies shot back, pursuing a professional struggle that became very personal, attacking Audubon with an intensity that may well have even exceeded Wilson’s own, had he lived. Thanks to the work of Wilson’s Philadelphia friends and defenders, Audubon would confront challenges to his ornithological accuracy and even integrity, with accusations (apparently true in a few cases) of having copied some of Wilson’s images and published them as his own.46 Wilson would forever be the “Father of American Ornithology” in the minds of his admirers, the original standard against which all subsequent work must be measured. No matter how much Audubon believed himself to have far exceeded that standard, he would always have his Scottish predecessor hovering like a grim ghost over his life. The edgy 1810 encounter between the two remained a problematic issue in Audubon’s personal history and in the history of The Birds of America, later creating artistic and scientific comparisons that Audubon could never escape.47
In 1842, an American author writing under the nom de plume Christopher North celebrated the prospect of Wilson and Audubon in an ornithological pantheon: “‘Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon!’ We call on them—and they appear and answer to their names … they grasp each other’s hand.… They are brothers, and their names will go down together … in all the highest haunts of ornithological science.”48 By that time, however, any notion of ornithological solidarity between the two had to be a fantasy. Instead of figuratively grasping each other’s hand, they might more likely have been portrayed clutching each other’s throats. Any notion of scientific collaboration had long since taken on a much more menacing aspect, leaving a legacy of unseemly enmity and competition that lasted throughout their lives, and even beyond.
First Taste of Financial Failure
In the meantime, at least for the decade after 1810, Audubon still had to take
