Birds of a Feather

In 1893, an illegal alien--a draft-dodger and bastard son of a philandering French privateer--arrived on these shores with a bad case of yellow fever. He would soon prove himself a poor businessman, but an excellent woodsman at a time when the United States was mostly woods. He deliberately shot countless birds, many from species now extinct or endangered, but his name today is emblematic of the most saintly conservation causes. Called Jean Rabin among other names as a boy, he was, of course, John James Audubon, an American pioneer of the truest kind--that is, an oddball. And he couldn’t have come along at a better time.

Dashing and handsome (and vain about that), he was a bit of a poseur, happy to let people think he had studied painting under the French master, David (whom he might have met once). In fact, self-taught as an artist and eclectic to the point of artistic opportunism, he created an oeuvre as artistically fresh and historically important to America as that of another nomad, George Catlin, having taken it into his head to “imitate” all the birds of the still wild new land he plunged into with a joy bordering on ecstasy.

Nobody can explain such genius but novelist Shirley Streshinsky’s riveting new biography, AUDUBON: Life and Art in the American Wilderness (Villard Books: $25; 408 pp.), infuses this man’s career with the same vigorous spark of real life that Audubon uniquely brought to the depiction of America’s birds. It was a career in which the tumult of the American wilderness was a crucial dancing partner, and Streshinsky brings those times to life.

Audubon arrived not only in the nation’s youth but at a time when art and zoological science had not yet been divorced. European publishers were churning out popular books with careful illustrations of the world’s avian jewelry, the better to sort this astonishing diversity into the scientifically invaluable pigeon holes of Linnaean classification. Illustration well served classic natural history, then as now, and in retrospect (and with a few exceptions) much of what went before Audubon was worthy and a bit wooden.

Some of Audubon’s early efforts were no different--static, carefully rendered profiles--and some of these are instructively included in a magnificent volume published on behalf of the New York Historical Society, JOHN JAMES AUDUBON: The Watercolors for “The Birds of America” edited by Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. (Villard Books/The New York Historical Society: $75; 282 pp.)

The book is based on an exhibition of the works--not just watercolors but pastels, oils, pencil, a mixture of media even including opportunistic montage--that formed the basis of the engravings for Audubon’s monumental “Birds of America.”

Here one can see an evolution at work, as the passionate lives of the birds that swarmed in this pristine continent erupted--effervesced--onto the paper that Audubon carried with him on his nearly addictive treks into the forests, swamps and river lands. Old artistic conventions simply fell before the infectious and unfettered vigor of life Audubon so keenly observed around him.

In that same spirit, this beautifully made book of highly accessible scholarship asks us to look again at the now-familiar paintings with the same care that Audubon observed his subjects. And while some of these images are as familiar today as corporate logos--the wild turkey, the oddly contorted whooping crane feeding on baby alligators, the dashing, piratical blue jays--it pays to take another look.

We learn, for example, how great an ordeal it was to paint the golden eagle seizing its prey, a hare. In fact, Audubon evidently suffered a seizure during this task. And in the original is a man in buckskins off in the distance, inching along a log across a precipice with a dead eagle he had seized strapped to his back--a psychological self-portrait.

In a different mood altogether, the exquisite barn swallows (shown here): Why didn’t he show these aerialists in joyous flight? Look again, says Carole Ann Slatkin’s essay accompanying the plate, at “the undulating form created by the combined silhouette of the two birds, which the viewer’s eye follows from lower left to upper right. . . .”

There is the flight pattern.

By the time Audubon’s work saw light, science has already begun to veer away from art, and this splendid volume makes one nostalgic for those perhaps more innocent times. It is a visual feast--and not just for those already hooked on what many art historians have pigeon-holed as a sub-genre: bird art. For here and in the biography, which were no doubt intended to be taken together, is a generous reminder of that strange, largely inexplicable, subtle and at the same time exuberant notion sometimes called the American spirit, and how it can erupt in the strangest of guises from time to time in this land of immigrants.