INSPIRED NATURALIST

By Paul Gray

"Audubon's Birds of America is a book which everyone has heard of and which everyone wants to see at least once in his lifetime." Thus, in 1888, wrote George Brown Goode, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, about the stunning and still famous masterwork produced by John James Audubon (1785-1851). So it seems only fitting that the Smithsonian is offering everyone a chance to see the so-called double-elephant folio edition of The Birds of America, which Audubon and a team of British printers, engravers and colorists laboriously assembled between 1827 and 1838. This massive volume, one of the 200 originally printed, is the centerpiece of "Audubon & the Smithsonian," a yearlong exhibit that recently opened at the National Museum of American History in Washington.

But the exhibit does not simply provide visitors a chance to look at one big, beautiful book. "There's more to Audubon than just the bird pictures," says Smithsonian Institution Libraries guest curator Helena Wright. The items she and her staff have assembled--many gathered from the Smithsonian's own holdings--certainly bear her out. An original copy of Audubon's less famous work on mammals, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845-48), demonstrates his astonishing range in art and natural science. Both are fields he mastered, as far as anyone can tell, by teaching himself.

If Audubon were able to visit this show mounted in his honor, he might find it a trifle modest: two rooms filled with books, watercolors, excerpts from his extensive writings, a few of the natural specimens he collected and drew, and personal effects such as his embroidered leather coat and trousers, beaded moccasins and bear-claw necklace. And all these artifacts are rather dimly lit, since the Smithsonian could not afford to install the fiber-optic lighting that would protect precious illustrations from fading. But Audubon would have found any tribute to himself insufficient; while he lived, he was as easy to admire for his achievements as he was difficult to like for his aggressive and vainglorious personality.

Born in Haiti as the illegitimate son of a French planter and slave trader and his Creole mistress, Audubon was sent to France for a brief education and then to live on a property owned by his father near Philadelphia, where he became enamored of local birds and wildlife. But a series of businesses he tried all failed; in 1819 he had to declare bankruptcy. That was when, at age 35, he decided to enlarge the collection of American bird paintings he had done over the years and prepare them for publication.

That this mission enabled him not only to survive but to become famous still seems incredible. At the outset, most of his contemporaries scoffed at this upstart crow with no known training in either art or ornithology. Audubon scoffed back. In 1824 he managed to antagonize the Philadelphia scientific community and could find no publisher for his swelling collection of bird paintings. Two years later, he departed for England, where, togged out in backwoods garb, he wowed the sophisticates, arranged a publishing deal and oversaw the realization of his dream.

"I have never drawn from a stuffed specimen," Audubon claimed in 1828. "Nature must be seen first alive." Like nearly everything else he said about himself, this statement was, at best, a half-truth. Audubon killed thousands of birds; before photography and high-resolution binoculars, that was the only possible way to render accurate images of them. But before Audubon shot them, he watched his subjects intensively, noting how they moved and behaved, the plants or habitats they preferred. When he had his bird in hand, he used wires to arrange the specimen in a characteristic pose.

Audubon's bird illustrations have become part of the experience of living in America, available on calendars, coffee mugs and cd-roms. The Smithsonian exhibit traces these images back to their humble and extraordinary roots.

--Reported by Dick Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Dick Thompson/Washington