of responsibility and opportunity the place provided. He sent him off to America, then, with a letter of credit and a connection to a well-trusted local agent, giving him just the sort of support a young man might need for a promising start in the new nation.
Looking back some years later on that American beginning, Audubon clearly appreciated his father’s sending him to the Pennsylvania farm. He wrote fondly of his early days at Mill Grove, embracing the place as a “blessed spot” as he looked upon the work his father had done years before, “the even fences round the fields, or on the regular manner with which avenues of trees, as well as the orchards, had been planted by his hand.”1 In fact, that work had been done by the hand of a tenant, who had also discovered lead deposits underground sometime in the 1790s, giving an additional dimension to Mill Grove. Lead wasn’t as good as gold, but in a bullet-hungry hunting country like the United States, such a mineral bonus could certainly be a substantial asset. With the promising combination of land and lead, then, everything seemed quite well laid out for young Audubon, just waiting for him to make it even better.
Unfortunately, however—or, perhaps fortunately, given his eventual artistic success—Audubon had neither head nor heart for farm management, and he never made the most of the opportunity his father first offered. By his own account, he never made much of the various other business ventures he pursued during his first two decades in the United States. All he really wanted, he insisted, was to become a bird artist.
The Precarious Calling of Art
Becoming an artist of any sort has always been a low-percentage career move, particularly in an upstart place like the early nineteenth-century United States. The number of painters who became reasonably prominent at the time could probably be counted on two hands, and those who gained lasting significance on one. We might think immediately of John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) in the second half of the eighteenth century and Washington Allston (1779–1843), Thomas Cole (1801–1848), and Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) in the first half of the nineteenth, all of whom followed different paths to their profession. Copley, for instance, grew up in a poor Boston household headed by a widowed mother, an Irish immigrant who ran a tobacco shop, but he taught himself to paint well enough to make a comfortable living by making exquisite portraits of middle-class New Englanders in the era of the American Revolution. The American colonies, however, had neither the art museums nor the painting masters that could help an aspiring artist rise to the next level, both professionally and financially. In 1774, Copley left America for England, where he studied at the Royal Academy, worked with the British master Benjamin West, and then took off on the near-requisite tour of the Continent to see the treasures of France and Italy. So, too, did Allston, who graduated from Harvard College in 1800 and soon thereafter followed in Copley’s footsteps to England, the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, and the Grand Tour. Theirs became the path that other aspiring American artists would hope to follow for the next two centuries.
Cole and Durand came up the harder way. Born into middling backgrounds at best, both of them the sons of merchant-tradesmen, neither had the opportunity to cross the Atlantic for artistic training. Instead, they learned their trade by becoming itinerant artists, slogging along the path of other painters who populated the broader base of the pyramid of American art, most of whom never made it to the loftier reaches of the American art world, such as it was. Itinerants catered to the rising aspirations of clients in the middling range of society, more ordinary folk who nonetheless had the wherewithal to pay for a “correct likeness”—even if the likeness turned out to be not exactly correct. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the demand for personal pictures grew rapidly as a form of consumption in a commercially expansive society, and itinerant artists carried their brushes from town to town, giving people the images—and emblems of status—they wanted. Largely self-taught, relying more on design books and simple observation than on a formal training, these artist-entrepreneurs did thousands of portraits of individuals, family groups, and sometimes even prized livestock, creating affordable artwork destined to hang on the walls of a family’s parlor rather in the staircase of a grand estate or halls of a gallery. They gave their sitters something of vernacular value, and then they moved on to do the same for people in the next town.2
Cole and Durand lived the life of the itinerant painter for a while, but both eventually turned their artistic attention to the American landscape and, equally important, attracted the attention of a prominent patron. John Trumbull, the well-born and successful artist, became a valuable advocate for both, helping them attain commissions from wealthy clients, members of the emerging American elite who would willingly pay for a painter’s artistry—sometimes if only to satisfy their own vanity. Patronage had a price, and their clients quite often dictated the tone, if not the actual content, of their paintings: In a time of increasing urbanization and industrialization, many patrons preferred images of romantic, even nostalgic, nationalism, paintings of a past American landscape that could be eternally preserved on canvas. Cole and Durand both became famous and prosperous as the twin pillars of the Hudson River School, but they sometimes felt their talents constrained, even squandered, by having to pander to the demands of aristocratic clients who commissioned the work and took it as their right to influence its execution.3
Audubon, like Cole and Durand, would work his way upward while still following a career path very much of his own making. Along the way, he would have to undertake the kinds of ad hoc tasks that had become common among America’s itinerant artists—making quick and cheap portraits, painting signs, or teaching art classes—but only as a financial means to a larger artistic end. Audubon never quite used the term “struggling artist” to describe himself, but he did indeed struggle, usually without much help from anyone else. Audubon came from a reasonably prosperous family, and even though he claimed (almost certainly falsely) to have studied with the great French painter Jacques-Louis David, his background in France did little for his art career in America. Friends of his father and, later, father-in-law proved to be useful allies, but none of them became as committed a champion as John Trumbull, much less a financially supportive patron of Audubon’s artistic ambitions. Perhaps the best one can say is that Audubon developed such a single-minded dedication to one single task—drawing birds—that he did not have to bow to the artistic expectations or a priori demands of a patron. To be sure, he would spend an enormous amount of time and trouble trying to track down people wealthy enough to pay for his “Great Work,” but he did so in pursuit of subscriptions, not commissions. For better or worse, he had no one telling him what to do, and he could follow his own passion.
We now know the remarkable result. In strictly aesthetic terms, he became a better bird artist than anyone else had ever been: The proof is in the pictures. Moreover, no one in nineteenth-century America so successfully combined artistic and scientific ambition or did more to bring nature to the nation. Audubon’s birds became emblematic of the fusion of art and science in antebellum American culture.
The Persistent Calling of Birds
Still, for all the fame and lasting success of Audubon’s astounding lifetime achievement, The Birds of America, there remains a basic question that has to be asked: Why did he do it? Why did he devote the better part of his adult life to producing a huge book about every bird known in North America? How sensible would it be, after all, to make one’s calling out of wandering through the woods or along the riverbanks and seashores, looking for birds, shooting them, arranging their decomposing carcasses into lifelike poses, drawing the dead birds, filling in the pictures with paint, working with an engraver and a publisher to make a big and expensive book, and then wandering around some more, essentially from door to door, to try to sell the book to skeptical customers? All sorts of people, from the middling ranks to the upper reaches of society, wanted individual and family portraits, especially in the era before photography made accurate likenesses readily available. Socially prominent patrons might also pay quite well to commission a large landscape, especially if they could exert enough influence over the artist to shape the painting to their vision of a romanticized past. Many devotees of natural history would also pay for one-off paintings of plants and animals—but a whole collection of birds? Of all the many ways a young
