later written descriptions of birds in Ornithological Biography have a connection to his Henderson days, as did some of the images drawn during that period, which later made their way into the finished version of The Birds of America. Unfortunately, though, not many of the latter survived. In fact, he had probably suffered a net loss in the number of drawings, most famously when, as he recounted in the introduction to Ornithological Biography, a pair of Norway rats took up residence in a box of his work and gnawed the papers into nesting material. He was understandably distraught at the loss—“reader, feel for me”—but then, in classic Audubon fashion, he turned near-tragedy into triumph: “I took up my gun, my note-book, and my pencils, and went forth to the woods as gaily as if nothing had happened … and, ere a period not exceeding three years had elapsed, I had my portfolio filled again.” He may indeed have done so, but very few images from the Henderson era now survive. It might even seem that instead of neglecting his business for the birds, as Audubon so often liked to tell it, he had actually done just the opposite.77
But again in classic Audubon fashion, he cast the collapse of his business and the attendant economic agonies of 1819 as an artistic epiphany, a realization that “nothing was left to me but my humble talents.” “Were those talents to remain dormant under such exigencies? Was I to see my beloved Lucy and children suffer and want bread, in the abundant State of Kentucky? Was I to repine because I had acted like an honest man? Was I inclined to cut my throat in foolish despair?” To those rhetorical questions, Audubon had an emphatic answer: “No!! I had talents, and to them I instantly resorted.”78 And with them he moved on to the next step in his career.
Cincinnati Respite
After the debacle of bankruptcy, Audubon’s immediate prospects had only one way to go, of course, and up they went—at least a bit, at least for a while. He did indeed resort to his artistic talents to support his family, taking on portrait commissions for around five dollars a head. Although he had little training (and even less interest) in portraiture, he gained a good reputation for doing the work quickly and effectively for his clients, drawing both the living and, when family members of a soon-to-be-lost loved one wanted one last likeness, the dying. He even did one posthumous portrait of the disinterred son of a Kentucky clergyman, which, he said, “I gave to the parents as if still alive, to their intense satisfaction.” (As it happened, Audubon suffered the loss of a child of his own soon afterward: Lucy gave birth to Rose, named after Audubon’s own half-sister in France, in 1819, soon after Audubon got out of jail in Louisville, but the infant girl died in early 1820, just seven months old.) Whatever his general disgruntlement over the less-than-agreeable artistic calling of producing quick portraits, Audubon kept himself sane with his unstoppable pursuit of birds. “In this particular there seemed to hover round me almost a mania,” he later explained, “and I would even give up doing a head, the profits of which would have supplied our wants for a week or more, to represent a little citizen of the feathered tribe.”79
Better still, he suddenly got a good, bird-related break. He heard that Dr. Daniel Drake, a prominent physician and president of the new Medical College of Ohio, in Cincinnati, needed an artist and taxidermist for the natural history collections he was helping assemble for another new institution in that city, the Western Museum. With a few letters of reference quickly sent to Cincinnati, Audubon soon found himself with a promising job offer—working on the museum’s specimen collections for a decent-seeming salary of $125 per month. With a patron like Drake, Audubon might well begin to imagine a new future.
Drake was a man of lofty intellectual and civic ambitions.80 Born in the same year as Audubon, 1785, he had had quite a bit more success in life, with a solid career in medicine and teaching already to his credit, along with several memberships in prominent learned societies, including, since 1818, Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society.
But the Philadelphia institution that Drake wanted most to emulate in Cincinnati was Charles Willson Peale’s museum, or “Repository for Natural Curiosities,” the best-known and most successful exhibition space in the United States at the time. With a well-organized display of natural history specimens—plants, stuffed birds and mammals, even a mastadon skeleton—along with portraits of prominent Americans, Peale had created a site for both entertainment and instruction, a place where people could gaze about the gallery and behold some of the wonders of the American wilderness without even going outdoors. In the process, Peale gave his visitors a way to understand the connection between nature and nation, and he confidently expected that a museum of this sort could be a credit to its founder, to its city, and to the country as a whole.81
So did Drake, and he sought to create something similar in Cincinnati. Incorporated as a city only in 1819, Drake’s Cincinnati seemed a pale reflection of Peale’s Philadelphia, with just under 10,000 inhabitants in 1820, compared to almost 64,000 in the Quaker City. Like Philadelphia, though, Cincinnati had a hodgepodge population, with a combination of New England Yankees, Pennsylvanians, Virginians, and Kentuckians, not to mention a growing number of Germans and other European immigrants. Like Peale, Drake saw the new museum as a means of providing a civilizing influence over such a diverse society.82 “As the arts and sciences have not hitherto been cultivated among us to any great extent,” he observed, speaking the obvious truth, “the influence they are capable of exerting on our happiness and dignity is not generally perceived.” But rooted in a foundation of scientific method, the Western Museum could be a place of celebration of the arts and sciences, where the eclectic collection of items “will rise from it in order and beauty, like those which start from the prepared canvass into imitative life, under the creative pencil of the painter.”83
Audubon needed money more than he needed such lofty pronouncements about the rise of order and beauty, even with a positive word about the “creative pencil of the painter.” Unhappily, he apparently didn’t make as much as he had hoped in working for Dr. Drake, and he later complained that “the members of the College museum were splendid promisers and very bad paymasters.” Anyway, his work for the Western Museum came to a fairly quick end, because he and his colleague Robert Best, the British-born curator of the collection, were “so industrious,” he wrote, “that in about six months we had augmented, arranged, and finished all we could do for the museum.”84 Drake laid Audubon off at the end of April 1820, and even though he promised to pay Audubon for the work he had done, the money never materialized. Audubon and Lucy stayed on in Cincinnati, both teaching to make ends meet, both no doubt wondering what they might be able to do next.
Still, the time spent working at the Western Museum proved valuable in ways other than monetary. Audubon got additional experience in taxidermy, he found time to consult the museum’s copy of Wilson’s American Ornithology and other ornithological works, and he had the good fortune to display his bird drawings to prominent visitors to the museum—most notably Major Stephen Long, the expedition leader; Thomas Say, the naturalist; and Charles Willson Peale’s son Titian, himself a budding artist-naturalist, all of whom “stared at my drawings of birds.”85 He also gained some valuable recognition for the useful work he had done. Elijah Stack, the president of Cincinnati College, wrote a letter of recommendation for Audubon, noting that “he has been engaged in our Museum for 3 or 4 Months & his performances do honor to his Pencil.”86
Daniel Drake also put in a good word in a public venue. On the evening of June 10, 1820, in his formal address just before the opening of the Western Museum, Drake gave both Audubon and his profession a positive plug in his formal remarks before an audience of the museum’s patrons. When speaking specifically about the field of ornithology, he made the obligatory bow to Alexander Wilson, acknowledging that to “this selftaught, indefatigable and ingenious man we are indebted for most of what we know concerning the natural history of our Birds.” No sooner had he given Wilson this compliment, though, than he compromised it with an ornithological qualification based on his regional devotion to “that portion which we inhabit,” the Ohio River Valley and the territory closer to the Mississippi River. While Wilson had “nearly completed” the study of birds of the
