John James Audubon

Audubon shot the birds first, then wired them into lifelike poses and painted them. Birds of America (1827-1838), engraved and printed in Scotland and England, contains plates measuring roughly thirty-nine by twenty-six inches so the birds could be shown life-size. It is one of the most ambitious natural history publications ever produced.

He was born illegitimate in 1785 in Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the son of a French merchant and a Creole woman. He was sent to America at eighteen to avoid Napoleonic conscription. He was also a serial fabricator: he claimed his father was an admiral (he was a captain), said his family had been imprisoned in the Bastille (they had not), and invented frontier stories about fighting wolves and sleeping in igloos. He ran a dry-goods store in Kentucky and was jailed for bankruptcy in 1819.

The paintings themselves are extraordinary: precise, dynamic, and composed with a narrative quality that goes beyond scientific illustration. His legacy is contested. The National Audubon Society and several regional chapters dropped his name in 2023 because of his documented history as an enslaver. He died in 1851.