Drawn From Nature
In the heat of the afternoon, the swamp was drowsy and still. Turtles rested on a fallen log. An alligator lazed by the water. High up in a cypress tree, there was a flash of color as a great blue heron smoothed her feathers and settled back on a mossy branch. Only the mosquitoes were busy, swarming and humming in the heavy air.
A gunshot blasted the stillness. Hundreds of birds burst shrieking from the treetops, flying in every direction. All except the great blue heron. She clung to her branch for a second, then tumbled down dead to the water below. The hunter, John James Audubon, shouldered his gun and waded through the swamp to pick up his prey.
That same afternoon he made a painting of the beautiful bird, capturing her jewel-like colors—blue, black, white, a splash of red. He preferred using live birds as models but almost always drew from freshly killed ones instead. These were the days before photography, and he wanted to get every detail right, down to the smallest feather. “My wish to impart truths has been my guide,” he wrote, and he signed his pictures “Drawn from Nature, by J. J. Audubon.”1
Ever since he was a boy, he had been curious about birds and often skipped school to sketch them in the countryside near his home. Now he had set out to do what no one had done before—to paint all the bird species in North America. Many others over the centuries had painted birds. But most of their work seemed stiff and unnatural to Audubon, as if the birds were sitting for their portraits. He thought—no, he knew—that he could do better.
“My Work will be the Work indeed!” he declared.2 And it was. His masterpiece, The Birds of America, was a lifetime in the making. It is a magnificent collection of pictures of almost five hundred species—some of them discovered by Audubon himself—and when it was published, the world knew him as one of the greatest bird artists who had ever lived.
Audubon’s birds glow with life. They look real enough to hop off the page and fly away. His paintings not only show how the birds look but also tell a story about how they live. A mockingbird defends its eggs from a rattlesnake, a bald eagle clutches a catfish in its claw, a fat little puffin goes for a swim. The Birds of America is like a magical visit with all the winged creatures in a vast secret garden.
Born in Haiti and raised in France, Audubon had come to America in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president. There were only seventeen states in the Union then, so most of the country was to Americans a mysterious wilderness. Every year explorers set out to chart distant rivers and mountains. Audubon became an explorer, too, looking for birds in their natural habitats. “My whole mind was ever filled with my passion for rambling,” he wrote.3 He loved to wake up before the sun, gather his dog and his gun, and head out into the singing forest. His quest took him all over the North American continent from the Florida Keys to the stormy coast of Labrador and from the New Jersey shore to Indian Country in the Dakotas. He hiked hundreds of miles, floated down rivers, climbed rocks, and crawled into caves. Once while chasing an owl, he nearly drowned in quicksand. Audubon was a naturalist as well as an artist because he studied everything he could about the birds, from the size of their eggs to the speed of their flight. He even tried to understand their emotional lives. Almost every day he wrote letters and detailed field notes, which he later turned into bird “biographies” and lively tales of the frontier.
1. Great Blue Heron by John James Audubon.
Artist. Naturalist. Writer. Hunter and explorer. The far places and the birds called to him. To the end of his life he stayed true to his plan “to search out the things which have been hidden since the creation of this wondrous world.”4