II The Birds of America

Sacheverell Sitwell declared that ‘there is nothing in the world of fine books quite like the first discovery of Audubon’. One of the largest books ever printed, its size alone commands attention and an expectation which the exuberance of the drawings and the expertise of the engraver amply fulfil.

Jean Jacques Laforest Audubon was born in what is now Haiti on 26 April 1785, the illegitimate son of French sea captain and a servant girl. When he was three his father took him to France. In order to avoid conscription in the French army, he was sent to the United States in 1803 to manage his father’s farm in Pennsylvania (his forenames were anglicized to John James). In 1805 he returned to France, where he remained for a year. In later life he claimed to have studied under the French neo-classical painter Jacques-Louis David, but his work reveals none of his influence. More likely, he received tuition from one of David’s pupils. At 21 he was back in America with a French partner, Ferdinand Rozier, to help him run the family farm, which through incompetent management had to be sold in 1807. Audubon preferred to develop his skills in drawing birds in pencil, pastel and watercolour. He made a ‘position board’, as he called it, a framework of flexible wire to support freshly shot birds in life-like postures, quickly sketching his specimens before the colours of eyes and bill faded.

A general store in Louisville, Kentucky that he and Rozier ran was visited in March 1810 by Alexander Wilson, a bird painter soliciting subscribers for his American ornithology (1808–14). Perhaps his chance encounter suggested to Audubon the idea of a similar project. With his wife Lucy, whom he had married two years earlier, he started another retail store, this time in  Henderson, Kentucky, subsequently trading for a year with his brother-in-law in flour, pork and lard in New Orleans before returning to Henderson to open a mill. He met Wilson again in 1812, a year before he died, and although he could not yet match his draughtsmanship, he already had a surer grasp of composition. When his business in Henderson failed in 1819, Audubon landed in a debtors’ prison and was declared bankrupt. He supported his family by chalk portraiture and teaching art, which he still continued to do after he became a temporary taxidermist in Western Cincinnati in 1820.

With neither aptitude nor inclination for business, he informed Henry Clay, Speaker of the House of Representatives, in a letter of 12 August 1820, of a trip he was about to make to New Orleans. He intended to enlarge the collection of bird drawings he had amassed over the past fifteen years ‘with a view to publishing them’. Taking with him a talented young thirteen-year-old student, Joseph Mason, he joined a cargo boat sailing south along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He collected and drew birds while his companion incorporated floral compositions. Audubon never acknowledged Mason’s contribution; he even deleted his signature from drawings before despatching them to the engraver, an act of ingratitude that other assistants were also to suffer. By now Audubon had attained a fluency in mixed media: pencil, pastel, watercolour and gouache. The size of the specimen he drew dictated the size of paper he used, the largest sheets being 25 by 38 inches; he adroitly contorted particularly large birds to fit them in.

In the spring of 1824 he visited Philadelphia, the home of the American Philosophical Society, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and a number of publishers. The ninth and final volume of Alexander Wilson’s American ornithology was being edited there and Charles Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew, was writing a supplement to it. Instead of being welcomed, Audubon was viewed as an interloper; ‘the trader naturalist’, some dubbed him. His flamboyant dress, his assured manner, perceived as arrogance, and his claim to a French pedigree alienated many of the townsfolk, who had felt more comfortable with Wilson’s modest mien. George Ord, the editor of Wilson’s posthumous volume, dismissed Audubon’s drawings as inaccurate. Alexander Lawson, Wilson’s engraver and now preparing plates for Bonaparte’s forthcoming book, was likewise hostile. Much more sympathetic, Charles Bonaparte urged Audubon to persevere in his quest for a publisher. Audubon might have experienced difficulty in finding an engraver with a press large enough to handle the double-elephant sized prints he had in mind. An American engraver who had recently returned from England advised him to seek an engraver there.

Acting upon this advice, Audubon sailed from New Orleans in May 1826, landing at Liverpool on 21 July. He was rather peeved when a Customs official exacted a duty of twopence on each of his several hundred watercolours. The most rewarding of several letters of introduction he had brought with him was that addressed to the Rathbone family, prominent among the city’s intelligentsia. Through the Rathbones he met the banker, collector and botanist William Roscoe, who organized a successful exhibition of more than 200 of Audubon’s drawings, earning him £100 in admission fees. Roscoe staged a similar exhibition in Manchester, unfortunately poorly attended. The American consul there convinced Audubon that he should sell his book by subscription. Back in Liverpool Henry G. Bohn, the London bookseller, recommended a sortie to London to meet naturalists who would introduce him to the best printers, paper-makers, engravers and colourists. He should carry out a similar exercise in Paris, Brussels and possibly Berlin, to compare costs. The first number should be accompanied by a prospectus, and Bohn advised him to consider the size of the book most carefully:

Remember my observations on the size of your book, and be governed by this fact, that at present productions of taste are purchased with delight, by persons who receive much company particularly, and to have your book laid on the table as a pastime, or an evening’s entertainment, will be the principal use made of it, and that if it needs so much room as to crowd out other things or encumber the table, it will not be purchased by the set of people who now are the very life of the trade. If large public institutions only and a few noblemen purchase, instead of a thousand copies that may be sold if small, not more than a hundred will find their way out of the shops; the size must be suitable for the English market.⁴⁴

Edinburgh repeated the enthusiastic reception Audubon had enjoyed in Liverpool. Looking a colourful embodiment of James Fenimore Cooper’s American frontiersman, dressed in a wolfskin jacket, hair flowing to his shoulders, he sat for his portrait and a phrenologist made a cast of his head. The prestigious Wernerian Society of Edinburgh elected him a member. ‘I am positively looked on by all the professors & many of the principal persons as very extraordinary,’ he proudly informed his wife.

W.H. Lizars, at that time engaged in engraving plates for P.J. Selby’s Illustrations of British ornithology (1818-33) and Sir William Jardine’s edition of Alexander Wilson’s American ornithology, was introduced to him in October 1826. Impressed by Audubon’s drawings and undaunted by their size, he offered to make some trial proofs. Audubon, delighted with the results, immediately engaged Lizars to engrave all the plates, double-elephant size (approximately 39¹/₂ by 29¹/₂ inches, or 73 by 53 cm), for a work with five plates to each part and priced at two guineas for subscribers. He sent a draft prospectus to William Roscoe for literary embellishment. The first prospectus (it was to be frequently reissued with extracts from favourable reviews to attract more subscribers) appeared on 17 March 1827. The five plates in each part of The Birds of America would consist of one of the largest drawings, a medium-sized one and three smaller ones. ‘In every number there will be a nondescript bird, or one not generally understood to be a native of the United States. There are upwards of 400 drawings, and it is proposed that they shall comprise three volumes, each containing about 130 plates.’

While the prospectus was being considered Audubon travelled extensively in the north, exhibiting his watercolours and some specimen engravings, talking to scientific societies, never declining any hospitality even if it meant dining late (‘I cannot refuse a single invitation’). He was successful in recruiting subscribers in Liverpool and Edinburgh; a visit to a Mr Selby’s house in Northumberland roped in three more; Newcastle upon Tyne and Leeds were disappointing, with only three and five respectively; York committed itself to ten, Manchester to eighteen. By mid-May 1827 he had promises of 100 subscriptions and confidently predicted he would soon double that figure, an optimistic forecast that did not take account of losses. During the course of publication of The Birds of America 188 subscribers were to drop out. They defaulted for a number of reasons: the uncertainty of a long-term commitment; complaints about shoddy work, especially hand-colouring; lapses in the delivery of parts; and the current economic depression. In September 1827 Audubon was forced to make another tour just to collect outstanding debts.

In May 1827 he travelled south to meet London’s potential customers. One of his northern subscribers, the Countess of Morton, persuaded him to trim his long hair and wear clothes more appropriate to the capital. He failed to gain an audience with George IV, but the monarch became a subscriber and patron of the book.

Within a month of his arrival, Lizars informed Audubon that since his colourers were on strike he would send the second part to London for colouring. The tone of another letter from Lizars a few days later intimated that he was no longer interested in the project. An entry in Audubon’s journal for 30 September 1827 records the end of their business association: ‘I have removed the publication of my work from Edinburgh to London, from the hands of Mr Lizars into those of Robert Havell, No. 79 Newman Street, because the difficulty of finding colorers made it come too slowly and also because I have it done better and cheaper in London.’

Robert Havell, father and son, were the proprietors of a well-established firm of engravers. When terms had been mutually agreed, Lizars was requested to forward the ten copper plates he had already engraved. Four of them were textured with aquatinting by Havell and Lizar’s name was ungraciously omitted from the captions in later states of some of them. Almost the entire workforce of the Havells was devoted to the production of The Birds of America. It has been stated that some 50 colourists were involved. The only other important natural history book which engaged their staff at the time was Priscilla Bury’s A selection of Hexandrian plants (1831–34) with 51 aquatints (Audubon was one of its 79 subscribers). With this encouraging improvement in their business, the Havells made the bold decision to move to more spacious accommodation at 77 Oxford Street in 1831, calling it The Zoological Gallery.

Audubon told his wife that by employing Havell he had reduced Lizar’s charges by a quarter. He paid Havell £114 for engraving, printing and colouring 100 copies of each number. Charging subscribers two guineas a number yielded a profit of just over £100, out of which Audubon had to pay administrative and travelling costs. For as long as possible he managed the business single-handed, but it soon became necessary to employ regional agents and booksellers to deal with some of the subscriptions. Whenever members of Audubon’s family came to England, they, too, were involved in some of the administrative chores. Audubon had accommodation in Havell’s premises, where he produced oil-painted versions of some of his watercolours. The money raised from their sale went towards expenses.

In June 1828 the partnership between Robert Havell senior and his son was dissolved and Robert Havell junior now had sole control. In January 1829 Audubon arranged for a set of existing numbers of The Birds of America to be coloured personally by Havell for presentation to Congress in Washington, in readiness for a campaign for subscribers in the United States.

A review by William Swainson of the first 30 engravings in The Birds of America appeared in J.C. Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History in May 1828. He used the word ‘genius’ several times in describing the six numbers so far published, deploring the fact that they had enjoyed no publicity in booksellers’ catalogues or in London’s print shops, nor any recognition from periodicals save a brief reference in the Zoological Journal. He quibbled about the accuracy of some tinting and the inclination of a bird’s bill, but these were minor criticisms in an otherwise enthusiastic review. Audubon’s drawing of turtle-doves ‘would secure [him] the highest meed of praise, so long as truth and nature continued the same’. In commending the author for producing ‘one of the cheapest [quality books] that can be purchased’, he regretted that most of the subscribers came mainly from Yorkshire, Liverpool and Manchester. Audubon naturally quoted from this favourable review in reprints of his prospectus. He also included a commendation from the French scientist Baron Cuvier; ‘C’est le monument le plus magnifique qui ait encore été élevé à l’ ornithologie.’

That eulogy was made at the French Academy of Sciences while Audubon was in Paris in September 1828. Cuvier, who had become a subscriber, displayed Audubon’s work to members. They admired it–’Quel ouvrage!’– but deplored the price–‘Quel prix!’ One of the royal courtiers persuaded Charles X to subscribe and the botanical artist Pierre Joseph Redouté obtained the pledge of the Duchess of Orléans. Audubon’s French excursion netted fourteen subscribers. His journal for 13 September records a meeting with the French engraver Dumesnil when they, rather surprisingly, discussed the printing of The Birds of America in France:

he told me honestly [it] could not be published in France to be delivered in England as cheaply as if the work were done in London, and probably not so well. This has ended with me all thoughts of ever removing it from Havell’s hands, unless he should discontinue the present excellent state of its execution. Copper is dearer here than in England, and good colorers much scarcer.⁴⁵

With his wife showing some reluctance to come to England, Audubon returned to the United States in April 1829 to recruit subscribers and to draw more birds, leaving J.G. Children of the British Museum in charge of his affairs. Not a single subscriber succumbed to his exhibition at the Lyceum of Natural History in New York. In Camden in Pennsylvania he drew migrating birds while his assistant, George Lehman, added landscape details. Here and elsewhere they completed between them 42 paintings in just five months. Audubon was received by President Andrew Jackson, and the House of Representatives subscribed to a copy of his book, which the American Journal of Science and Arts hailed as ‘the most magnificent work of its kind ever executed in any country’.⁴⁶

He persuaded his wife Lucy to join him on his return to England in April 1830, when he was dismayed to find that during his absence the number of subscribers had dwindled and non-payment of existing subscriptions had grown, due perhaps to a rumour that he had no intention of returning. Reports of inferior work particularly annoyed him. He warned Havell that ‘should I find the same complaints as I proceed from one town to another… I must candidly tell you that I will abandon the publication’. He could be a hard taskmaster and his criticisms, often concerning hand-colouring, were nitpicking.

He increased his output of oil paintings for sale to raise desperately needed capital. He had discovered this profitable source of earnings while in Edinburgh, when he paid a young Scottish landscape painter, Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, to complete them with floral backgrounds. Never at ease with this medium, Audubon taught Kidd bird portraiture, gradually leaving their reproduction in oils to him.

The Copyright Act of 1709 had lapsed, but its clauses relating to the presentation of new books to specified libraries in England and Scotland remained in force (originally nine libraries, increased to eleven after 1801). Fortunately for Audubon, books of engravings and lithographs without any text were exempt from this expensive requirement. For this reason the absence of any text in The Birds of America may have been a deliberate omission.⁴⁷ But at the outset Audubon had vaguely contemplated a companion work describing the birds he had drawn, with anecdotes of his experiences. Very conscious of his own inadequate education, he approached William Swainson, the author of the appreciative review of The Birds of America, to write it. When Swainson demanded substantial fees and joint authorship, Audubon looked for another collaborator. In William MacGillivray (1796–1852), a young zoologist living in Edinburgh, he found an ideal assistant. He accepted a smaller fee, did not insist on co-authorship, and was conscientious and industrious. When no Edinburgh publisher would take on the  Ornithological biography, as it was called, Audubon accepted the risk of publishing it himself. Seven hundred and fifty copies of the first volume, royal octavo in size, appeared in April 1831, priced at one guinea for subscribers of The Birds of America and 25 shillings for non-subscribers. Eventually subscribers received it free of charge.

Twenty numbers of The Birds of America completed the first volume; parts for the second volume were under way, and Audubon needed another American trip to draw water birds scheduled for the third volume. He sailed for New York in mid-July with Florida as his destination. In Charleston he made friends with John Bachman, a Lutheran minister and naturalist who was later to collaborate with him on a book on North American quadrupeds. Audubon shot and painted birds, and his travelling companions, George Lehman and an English taxidermist, Henry Ward, drew or preserved specimens.

Audubon lost no opportunity to enrol new subscribers and sent his son Victor to London to urge Havell to print more parts for this expanding American market. Lucy Audubon irritated Havell with complaints about the shortcomings of his craftsmen, and Victor, now in England, kept up the family pressure for perfection.

The other son, John, spent three summer months in coastal Labrador skinning specimens for his father, now on one of his last major expeditions for new birds. They moved south through the provinces of eastern Canada to New York, whence, in late September, Audubon sent Havell drawings to fill the last two parts of the second volume.

He decided to delay his departure to London until he had campaigned in towns he had not previously visited in the eastern United States. A successful tour was marred by vindictive comments from his old enemy George Ord and his English ally, the naturalist Charles Waterton. They ridiculed his scientific competence—an ‘ornithological impostor’, Waterton called him. Ord took pleasure in Audubon’s failure to attract as many American subscribers as he would have liked: ‘Did he really expect to have his monstrous book encouraged by subscriptions in United States?’

Now nearly fifty years old (‘I conceive myself growing old very fast,’ he told Havell), Audubon wished to speed up the completion of The Birds of America. Havell, having taken on another engraver, reckoned he could increase the annual output from five to eight, may be even ten, numbers. Volume 1 had concluded in 1830 and volume 2 in 1834; volume 3 was scheduled to be finished by 1835. Acutely depressed by the unrelenting pressures of its production and fearful that he might not be able to complete it, Audubon asked Victor to be prepared to continue it to the best of his abilities.

When he landed in Liverpool with his wife and John in May 1834, he heard that Lizars in Edinburgh was spreading malicious rumours about him. William Swainson had criticized the first two volumes of Ornithological biography . The stock of an American edition of this work had been burned in a Boston fire. His equipment for a future expedition was lost in a New York fire in 1835. His attempts to retrieve defecting subscribers in Manchester failed. All was not gloom, however. Engraved plates were emerging at a faster rate from Havell’s establishment. The quality of those in the 54th number particularly pleased Audubon: ‘You may now challenge the world of ornithological engravers without any fear,’ he assured Havell.

In need of more bird studies for the fourth and concluding volume of The Birds of America, Audubon returned home in 1836. His greatest coup in the year’s trip was the purchase of 93 bird skins collected by Thomas Nuttall and John K. Townsend in the Rocky Mountains and Columbia River, a region he had little likelihood of visiting. He used them to draw about 70 of these birds of the western United States.

After his return to London in the summer of 1837 he was faced with a difficult decision. In his original prospectus in 1827 he had promised a work of about 400 plates amounting to 80 numbers. If that figure were exceeded, he faced the possibility of the withdrawal of even the most loyal and tenacious subscribers. From 1836 he started depicting several species on the same drawing to restrict the number of plates. Nevertheless, he was convinced that it would be a grave error to omit the specimens in the Nuttall and Townsend collection. Determined to include them, he extended his work by another 35 plates, or seven numbers, making a total of 435 plates. The last plate was engraved on 16 June 1838, almost twelve years after Lizars had pulled his trial proofs. Audubon had wanted an edition of 500 sets, but according to his son Victor only about 175 were printed.

The Birds of America was Audubon’s raison d’être, the focus of his life to which even his patient wife and family were subordinated. One admires his determination to recruit subscribers, to find new specimens to draw and to maintain exacting standards in the engraving and colouring. According to his accounts he spent £28,910 ($115,000) on publishing the work. In March 2000 a set of the four volumes was sold at Christie’s in New York for £5,500,000 (the copy had come from the Marquess of Bute’s library).

Ornithological biography came to an end in May 1838 with the publication of the fifth volume. In July a Synopsis listing in systematic order 491 species in The Birds of America was published. MacGillivray was the scientific adviser and editor of the Ornithological biography, checking the classification and nomenclature of the birds, providing anatomical details, improving Audubon’s English (‘smoothing down the asperities’, as Audubon put it). He deserved more than Audubon’s cursory acknowledgement. Audubon was reluctant to credit the help of collaborators like Joseph Mason and George Lehman. His greatest indebtedness was to Robert Havell, who not only produced some of the finest aquatints of his day, but as a competent artist was trusted by Audubon to provide backgrounds to some of his drawings. Sometimes Havell adjusted Audubon’s compositions, occasionally transferring a bird to a less crowded plate. Theirs was an uneasy relationship, with Audubon threatening to end the partnership, often finding imperfections in the plates, and deploring Havell’s inefficient management. Audubon owed most to the tolerance and loyalty of his wife, who relieved him of all domestic matters to concentrate on his book. She and her husband left England for good in September 1839. Robert Havell, whose business had been largely dependent on The Birds of America, sold his stock and premises and emigrated to the United States, where he settled just north of New York.

The Birds of America had not brought Audubon financial security. This he achieved with the sales of a royal octavo edition of his book. A camera lucida produced plates to about an eighth of the size of the originals. One hundred numbers were published in Philadelphia between 1840 and 1844, each with five lithographs. With 1199 subscribers it was a bestseller; an initial print run of 300 copies expanded to over 1000.

After his father’s death in 1851, Audubon’s son John risked a chromolithographic version, this time double-elephant size but half the price of the original. He had planned 45 numbers, but only 105 plates had been issued by 1860 when mismanagement and the American Civil War put an end to it. Lucy, now impoverished, sold her husband’s watercolours to the New York Historical Society and tried to dispose of the surviving copper plates; some had been lost in a New York fire in 1845. She sold them for scrap in 1871, but a number were saved from a smelting furnace by an alert employee who had identified them. These survivors, no more than 80, were restored and now repose in American museums and universities. Alecto Historical Editions, which had handled the plates of Banks’s florilegium for the Natural History Museum in London, printed from six of these plates in 1985 for the American Museum of Natural History.

44. Maria R. Audubon Audubon and his journals, vol. 1, 1898, p.128.

45. Maria R. Audubon Audubon and his journals, vol. 1, 1898, pp.315–16.

46. Vol. 16, 1829, pp.353–54.

47. The same reason may account for the absence of any text in J.E. Gray’s Illustrations of Indian zoology (1830–35) and Francis Bauer’s Delineations of exotick plants… at Kew (1796–1803), although the latter’s ostensible excuse was that the accuracy of the plates rendered any text superfluous.