James Audubon Killed All The Birds He Painted

One of America's great naturalists, John James Audubon painted highly realistic portraits of practically every type of bird in North America. The self-taught artist's resulting four-volume collection of life-size paintings , 'The Birds of America (1827-38)', is regarded as both an artistic and an ornithological masterpiece, and reproductions of his work are still brightening walls around the world.

But exactly how Audubon was able to capture our feathered friends' likenesses so completely is usually glossed over. The Encyclopedia Britannica fails to even broach the subject. The Audubon Society's page on their namesake mentions that he loves to hunt, but the connection is never explicitly made.

Audubon Shot All The Birds He Painted.

He then used wires to pose the corpses of these hawks, falcons, partridges, sparrows, woodpeckers, and other winged creatures before putting brush to canvas. In one diary entry, he writes about sneaking up on a large group of sleeping pelicans and blasting two of them before his gun was jammed and the two awakened survivors took off (he was disappointed that he dint get to kill them all.) And when hunting snoozing avians in the wild was too much trouble, he resorted to other methods. He once bought a caged eagle, killed it, then captured its likeness.

One of Audubon's biographers, Duff Hart-Davis, reveals: "The rarer the bird, the more eagerly he pursued it, never apparentlly worrying that by killing it he might hasten the extinction of its kind."

Over 1,000 individual birds appear in Audubon's paintings, but we know that the body count is much higher. He did't feel some kills were worthy of being painted. Others were put on canvas, but the artist was dissatisfied with his work and never displayed it. In other cases, he had already painted a specific type of bird but then found an intriguing individual variation, so he just had to blow it away.

He once wrote: "I call birds few when I shoot less than one hundred per day."

How perversely ironic. I had no idea such a stalwart of preservation had such an upbringing. Fascinating. Great find OP.

Thank You. What I found most funny about this is that the genereal populace (among those who know who James Adubon is) has no idea...

Its as if Ansel Adams destroyed every place he ever took a picture of lol

reply to post by Grock




And I am sure some would, even today, still say that it was "worth it" or something to that effect...

That doesn't surprise me really, I remember seeing a documentary on the Lewis and Clark expedition once and they talked about a similar topic...

The party would kill a certain type of animal and eat it, but not before the artist in the party drew it. It really makes you think about all of the drawings of animals you've ever seen...

At the same time, when they shot and killed these animals, the species where not even close to extinction. That came later when more and more people populated the areas the animals where in and killed them for food.

I'm not condoning the killing of birds to draw them, just saying...

I always find it surprising that things like this get so very little notice - even in circles such as these - shame....