Audubon: Life and Art in the American Wilderness - Hardcover

Streshinsky, Shirley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1630262749 ISBN 13: 9781630262747

Publisher: Turner, 2013

Synopsis

In 1803, an eighteen-year-old West Indies–born Frenchman arrived in New York City, fleeing Napoleon’s conscription. His work would become inextricably entwined with the new world he so proudly adopted in his motto “America, my country.”

Inspired by the primeval forests and the vast flocks of birds that thrived in them, Audubon spent the next several decades of his life painstakingly documenting the birds of the American wilderness. He traveled the back roads and bayous, searching out and studying the birds that were his pastime and passion. He spent long, silent hours observing them in the wild. He was no amateur ornithologist; rather, he drew his birds from life, and his work always carried the line “drawn from nature by J. J. Audubon.”

Accompanied by his wife, Lucy, and their two sons, Audubon was able to challenge the world’s expectations and win. The story of this loving family’s long, profound struggle is as poignant and as relevant today as it was in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Combining meticulous scholarship with the dramatic life story of a naturalist and pioneer, Audubon reexamines the artist's journals and letters to tell the story of Audubon's quest, the origins of the American spirit, and the sacrifice that resulted in one of the world's greatest bodies of art: The Birds of America.

About this title

Review:

Born Jean Rabin in France, John James Audubon made a name for himself in the New World almost in spite of himself. A failure at business, a footloose and difficult man, he perpetually fought off poverty to establish himself as a painter of America's fabulously varied wildlife. (To support himself while gathering the materials for his famous Birds of America, he painted portraits of New Orleans society ladies.) In this thoroughly researched and well-written biography, Shirley Streshinsky supplies little-known details about Audubon's early years and later tribulations, which were rewarded late in his life by widespread fame and the recognition of his singular contributions to early American science.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Fiction writer Streshinsky (The Shores of Paradise, 1991, etc.) brings her storytelling skills to bear on this accomplished biography of the famous painter of birds. Audubon (1778-1851), a prolific letter-writer and journal- keeper, left an enormous paper trail; although much of it was destroyed by a protective granddaughter, the remaining papers are rich in detail. Drawing on them, Streshinsky tell us that the artist emigrated to America from France in 1803 at the age of 18 and promptly fell in love with both the American wilderness and Lucy Bakewell, his future wife. By the early 1820's, as a failed businessman but expert woodsman, naturalist, and artist, he launched his plan to publish a book illustrating all the birds of America. He roamed the wilderness for several years and, by 1826, had sufficient paintings to go to England in search of a publisher. Audubon traveled through England, Scotland, and France, selling subscriptions to the proposed book, working with the engravers and colorists who reproduced his paintings, and painting furiously. Publication of The Birds of America and his Ornithological Biography brought him recognition and a measure of financial security, though he died before completing the illustrations for The Quadrupeds of America. Streshinsky quotes liberally from Audubon's writings, especially from his journals of the 1820's, when he was separated from his family. The picture that emerges is of a charming, hard-working, sometimes vain and petulant man with a intense love of nature. Surprising to many will be his letters from England begging that newly discovered birds be preserved in whiskey and shipped across the Atlantic to him. A well-modulated biography filled with details of frontier America, 19th-century publishing, scientific and artistic rivalries, and the striking differences between the cultures of the Old and New Worlds. (Sixteen pages of photographs--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Turner
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1630262749
• ISBN 13: 9781630262747
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 528