Audubon

Early Drawings
introduction by Richard Rhodes, scientific commentary by Scott V. Edwards, foreword by Leslie A. Morris

In 1805, Jean Jacques was a twenty-year-old itinerant Frenchman of ignoble birth and indifferent education who had fled revolutionary violence in Haiti and then France to take refuge in frontier America. Ten years later, John James Audubon was an American citizen, entrepreneur, and family man whose fervent desire to "become acquainted with nature" had led him to reinvent himself as a naturalist and artist whose study of birds would soon earn him international acclaim.

The drawings he made during his crucial decade--sold to Audubon's friend and patron Edward Harris to help fund his materwork,  The Birds of America, and now held by the Houghton Library and the Museums of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University--are published together here for the first time in large format and full color. In these 116 portraits of species collected in America and in Europe we see Audubon inventing his ingenious methods of posing and depicting his subjects, and we trace his development into a scientist and an artist who could proudly sign his artworks "drawn from Nature." The drawings also serve as a record of the birds found in Europe and the Eastern United States in the early 19th century, some now rare or extinct.

Splendid in their own right, these drawings also illuminate the self-invention of one of the most important figures in American natural history. They will delight all thsoe interested in American art, nature, birds, and the life and times of John James Audubon.

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