|
|
(back to page 2)
In January 1824, Bonaparte submitted a paper on his new petrels to the academy, where it was read to the members and later accepted for publication. On February 24, while Audubon was shivering on the docks and saving his pennies in Shippingport, the academy elected Bonaparte as a member. He was received warmly a week later at his first meeting. Bonaparte's new colleagues doubtless respected his ornithological work, but they were probably influenced by his glamorous connection with Europe as well. Born in France and raised in Italy, Bonaparte had wealth and a title of sorts. He was the prince of Musignano, which was neither a country nor even a locality, but merely his father's house on a hill overlooking the Italian town of Canino, not far from Rome. Still, Bonaparte was an aristocrat, even if he wasn't a very impressive one physically. He had dark hair and eyes, and he was short and plump. Everyone agreed he was the spitting image of his late uncle Napoleon, the emperor of France.
When Mease took Audubon to meet Bonaparte a few days later, the two naturalists saw at once that they were quite different, though they had much in common. Audubon, obviously, was French. But he was poor and only marginally educated, and seemed uncomfortable in his surroundings after years away from civil society. For his part, Audubon regarded the little man before him as scarcely more than a boy—though he was literate and precocious and displayed the easy assurance of the upper class. Both men must have found their meeting in this way the kind of odd circumstance that could only happen in America.
Bonaparte brushed aside the awkwardness of the moment. Like most naturalists, he was insatiably curious. Bonaparte invited Audubon to show him his drawings and made space on a table where the portfolio, which seemed unusually large, could be opened. As Audubon fumbled with the string, Bonaparte may have allowed himself to hope the portfolio contained a bird or two he could add to a list he was making of undescribed or misidentified North American species. The New World was full of taxonomic opportunity. Bonaparte, who'd pored over rare illustrated texts and investigated European specimen collections of birds from around the world, expected that he knew more about these matters than almost anyone alive. And Bonaparte had a good idea of what Audubon's paintings might look like. With luck, they would be proper scientific renderings—clean, two-dimensional studies of the birds in static profile, wings demurely folded alongside their bodies, the plumages neatly colored against a white background. Such work required not only skill, but also discipline and a patient attention to detail—not exactly qualities that Audubon projected.
Bonaparte stepped nearer the table. Audubon opened his portfolio.
It is unclear at which meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences Audubon first appeared after that. But word of everything else that happened in Philadelphia that summer traveled far and for a long time, as is usually the case with bad news.
Bonaparte had been amazed by Audubon's drawings. In his brief time in the city, Audubon had met a few painters Mease knew, and they had praised his work. But Bonaparte was the first person who truly understood the significance of what Audubon had brought out of the wilderness—and also the first to share Audubon's passion for his subjects. The paintings were unlike anything the young prince had seen, though they depicted something he loved deeply—the terrible life-and-death struggle that is nature itself. Aububon's birds were breathtakingly beautiful. And huge—even the largest were painted to full life-size, some filling Audubon's enormous sheets of paper from edge to edge. But it was the aliveness of the images that startled and delighted Bonaparte. Instead of showing only what the birds looked like, Audubon had captured how they lived. Wheeling beneath storm-wracked skies, clamoring in bushes and trees, recoiling from attacking animals, or ripping flesh in bloody gobbets from freshly killed prey, Audubon's ferocious birds looked as if they might fly screeching off the page. This was not good form, not the accepted style at all. It was something totally new. To Bonaparte, the birds looked truly wild, much like the strange, nervous man standing next to him.
With Bonaparte as his patron, Audubon rushed through the city over the next several weeks, being introduced to artists and scientists. Meanwhile, his new acquaintances developed a fascination with the artist—an inquisitiveness Audubon met with a Kentucky storyteller's penchant for exaggeration. Audubon was quite a piece of work—shy and awkward one minute, a blustery braggart the next. Everyone wanted to know who he was and where he came from. His account of himself, even alongside the slight support Dr. Mease could offer, was difficult to swallow. Audubon claimed to have been born in the territory of Louisiana. His father, he said, served as an admiral in the French navy and had also been a hero in the American war of independence. His mother was a Creole of Spanish extraction, who was courted and married by his father at her sprawling plantation near New Orleans. After her untimely death, Audubon was taken to France, where he was adopted by his father's second wife and developed an interest in nature and painting. One of his teachers there, Audubon boasted, was the great portraitist Jacques-Louis David. At eighteen, Audubon had come to America to manage his father's property, a large farm called Mill Grove, just west of Philadelphia. From there, he said, he had traveled far, seeing much of the country while devoting himself to the study of birds, acquiring a knowledge of their ways and appearance that he felt sure was unequaled by any other ornithologist.
And that is how the real trouble started.
Audubon was on safe ground in his airy dismissal of European naturalists as "cabinet ornithologists" who studied American birds by looking at moth-eaten stuffed specimens, never setting foot in America. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson—who had identified more than one hundred new bird species and who feuded with scientists in France over the vigor and uniqueness of New World fauna—American naturalists had been eager to gain authority in their own country. In Philadelphia, especially among members of the academy, any informed opinion against European views of American natural history was enthusiastically received.
But Audubon threatened the legacy of Alexander Wilson, America's preeminent ornithologist and a hero in the cause of New World scientific independence. Wilson, who had come to Pennsylvania from Scotland in 1794, was a poet and naturalist. A lonely man, Wilson was repeatedly troubled by political and romantic intrigues. He supported himself as a weaver and peddler, and later by teaching school and working as a book editor. Wilson discovered an interest in birds after he was befriended by William Bartram, an eminent botanist whose well-stocked library in Philadelphia became Wilson's favorite retreat. In 1804, the year he was granted citizenship, Wilson had set out to draw and write about all the birds of North America. He was advised against it. He had limited artistic ability and the large, lavishly illustrated book he had in mind—what we would today think of as a coffee-table book—made little financial sense. It was almost sure to cost him more to publish than he could ever hope to earn back.
(continued on the next page)
If you’re enjoying this excerpt and you’d like to sample other books, sign up for one of our Online Book Clubs: Click Here
|
|
|
