Focus 580; John James Audubon: the Making of An American

In this hour we will be talking about the life and work of the great wildlife artist John James Audubon and our guest is Richard Rhodes. He is the author of a new biography titled John James Audubon the making of an American is published by cannot and is just recently out. Rohde says that oughta been is the great American artist that no one knows. He also says that Audubon's life is a great example of how America became America. As we talk questions are certainly welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 Those are the numbers. Our guest Richard Rhodes is the author of 20 books including the making of the atomic bomb which won a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award of the book Dark Sun the making of the hydrogen bomb was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in history. He's been visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT host and correspondent for documentaries on Public Television's frontline and American Experience series and also currently he's researching a third volume of nuclear

history endgame that will look at the international politics of nuclear weapons across the past two decades. And he's joining us this morning by telephone. Mr. Rhodes Hello. Well thanks for talking with us. My pleasure thank you. I think that I remember reading in in one of the things that I've read about you in the book that this was the first book that you have written that was not set in the 20th century. Yes. So there we have to qualify that I realized later that my first novel was about the Donner party. But certainly this is the first work of nonfiction that I've written that's not set in the 20th century. Well so mostly you have the the history that you have explored is the history of the 20th century exactly what is it that you found so in gauging and so interesting about Autumn in that you wanted to put in the considerable amount of work that it took to assemble this book. Well besides being charming an extraordinarily interesting man just because of the ups and downs of his life and his huge chip Titian and his great success. I have always been intrigued

many of my books have been about America and who we are how we came to be who we are. Early on in my career for example I wrote a guidebook to the Ozarks of my wilderness for the Time-Life wilderness series. So I've been interested in America and here was a man who came of age at a time when we were becoming a nation and to lead an exemplary and fascinating life itself. So he was someone who really was worth spending two and a half years with. I got to like him better the more I researched his writing. Well the way that you talk about him as being charming charismatic. He was very handsome maybe a little bit vain about his looks. Yes. That he would have been I think again I read somewhere you saying something like this was the guy if you were having a party this was the man that you would want at your party. Well you know as a young adult when he arrived in America at the age of 18. From France where he had grown up he was trained in fencing well

enough that later in life he taught fencing. He was an elegant dancer and actually taught dancing for a living at one point. He played the violin and the flag alay which was a kind of recorder and maybe played the guitar as well that's not quite so clear. I skated beautifully at a time when ice skating in Pennsylvania where he lived for several years with a favorite sport of young people. So he simply he rode horses beautifully. He was just the kind of person that both men and women enjoyed being around. His father was French. Auban himself was born in Haiti and then his father brought him back to France and he has his he was not married to mother but apparently Audubon was accepted into the family and in fact the wife of his his father his brother's wife accepted him as well that would seem to me perhaps to be a little unusual.

I think it was unusual autoparts mother was a chambermaid in his father's house on a cotton plantation. Sorry sugar plantation in Haiti at a time when when that was the leading French colony abroad and when the first signs of the slave rebellion which turned that country upside down. It came to light in the early 1790s his father took him back to France he was his father's only son. The father was an older man at that point and his father's wife in France was seven years older than her father. She was an older widow childless whom his father had married probably for convenience for the convenience of both of them I mean to merge their properties. So on but they clearly liked each other and got along and this woman found this little boy he charming just as everyone would find him charming for both of his life. She doesn't extract a sentence from a letter she wrote to her husband that I think gives a wonderful sense of how she felt about the little boy whom she adopted and gave her name to. She Wrote. He's the handsomest boy in France but perhaps not the

most studious. So clearly she liked him and was happy to have him around and had raised him well. It seems that if you look at. But ask questions about what sort of a life experiences shape his character it seems pretty clear that the experiences that he had in his family had living through and surviving the French Revolution were very important an establishing the base for this person that he would become. You know he really did go through a great deal of trauma. The boy whose mother died of an infection when he was six months old. Which is why of course his father returned him to France because his father was gone so he was a half orphaned by the time he was one year old. He in France the family yes went through the French Revolution lost much of their wealth as did so many other people. The school system broke down during the French Revolution so his education was truncated evidently it stopped at about the age of 14.

And he was throughout his life embarrassed and sensitive about his lack of education when he was around more educated people even though he was supra field naturalist incident. Then they went through the terror which I think is is not understood very well today but it was something like going through the kind of violence and horror that's going on right now in the Iraq in the little city in the city of months where he and his family lived on the wild river in the west of France. There were hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered by the official authorities because there had been a counter revolution there and they were putting it down. This is the family the Audubon family was actually thrown in jail and barely escaped with their lives. So he had a full measure of traumatic experience to support something that's been generally passed over by his previous biographers I think it's important to his I mean he studied birds and drew birds as a way of understanding the world.

And by that I mean almost allegorically he saw if you will the human world through the world the bird. So even though he was an extroverted person and enjoyed being around people a deeper strain and his character was his pleasure in being in the woods and being away from people. He would say at later points in his life when he was frustrated but the production of his work or something well I could always just go back to the forest of my beloved bird and escape all this this discomfort and unhappiness. So he really did have a sense. A very. That's the essence of freedom. A period of creatures that had complex lives as human human beings too and in this naturalism that he came to. I think he found a way to work through the very complex feelings that a sensitive human being is left with when they go through these difficult childhood experience that gets at the interesting and tantalizing question of why birds.

Obviously he had artistic talent perhaps a natural talent he was not a bad portrait artist and he could have probably done other sorts of things in maybe even if he was going to be a wildlife artist he could have done other sorts of things but but obviously what we know him for is his great love of birds and he has his extraordinarily beautiful depictions of and then his writing is very detailed. And perspicacious study their behavior because the log with the Birds of America his great work of drawings and engravings He also wrote five volumes of what he called ornithological biography which was a detailed description of the behavior and lives and anatomy and appearance of all the birds that were there. In other words there he really did turn to this it's a way of exploring himself in the world. Why periods I think because after the revolution and after the terror his father retired from the French Navy and they moved down river from not to a little village

called Quraan where they had his father and mother had a substantial country house which is still there by the way in the fine the city of not has recently purchased it for a museum of Audubon material next door to the little village within easy walking distance of his house was a former Marsh which was now a dense and wonderful for us. It's still there today and it's called the Audubon forest. His father was interested in walking out into the woods with him and showing him the life there and talking about it. His father had a good friend who was a ship's doctor deorbiting who also served as one of the young autobahns mentors and who had two sons who became great French naturalists in their own right which suggests I think what a good teacher he was between these two men and perhaps others as well. Audubon was at a very vulnerable part in his early adolescence was exposed to the world of natural creatures and particularly birds and be good drawing. His

earliest drawings date back to consider early adolescence. So there was I think a connection did it had to do with the guidance that his his his and towards the teachers. He did as he says spent alot of time outdoors in nature he was spent a lot of time particularly observing birds. He was taught to do deception he was taught to do taxidermy and which was really necessary to his later Art. He spent two to produce the Birds of America spent an awful lot of time observing birds in the wild but and this is something that I think perhaps sometimes people have a hard time with the notion that in order to do these pictures he had to kill the birds at some point because his that the the the essential quality of these of these portraits is the composition and the way that the birds are posed in the way that they are shown and apparently what he did was he had to kill the birds and pose them that the dead birds pose them to use that as the as his models for the paintings that he

would do and I think that a lot of people just have a hard time putting together the love of birds and these beautiful pictures and oughta been and that was the way that we think about the natural world and wanting to preserve it with on the other hand the fact that he and in the course of his life probably killed an awful lot of birds. That's true. I think people who don't know anything else about Autobahn often know that he had to shoot birds in order to draw them and they're maybe horrified but let's be clear there were no cameras in the 10 there were not even any binoculars and the only way that you could get close to a bird and make it stand still long enough to draw it was to kill it. And indeed he was just doing what all ornithologist and naturalists did those days with the significant difference that Ornithology was kind of a closet science as he called it in his time.

The scientist would stay at home in Philadelphia let's say and he would hire one of the many market hunters who shot birds because all wild birds not only what we think of today as game birds but also song birds were harvested for food in that era when America had very little agriculture going yet mostly just small farms subsistence agriculture with not a lot of food prepared for the market. Birds were shot in the normal numbers for the city markets. Audubon once remembered. Seeing an 18 0 5 an entire barge load a passenger pigeon. The kind of very delicious wild pigeons floating down the Hudson River for the markets of New York if you found them. The birds in all the city markets. The next day for sale for five cents. So he was not he was doing something that was normal for the era at a time when people thought of birds rather the way we think of fish as simply a natural resource to be harvested in whatever quantities the previous sort of colleges however had not worked with fresh

specimens. They had sent the market hunter out to collect birds for them. And what he would do is give the bird shot preserve the skin with arsenic powder wrap it around a piece of frayed rope stuffing and then that would go back to the scientists so called for him to try to make some sense out of the anatomy and structure of a bird when all he had was the skin on a bun understood to to depict the bird in as lifelike as possible. You would need to work with the freshly killed specimen which is why I like the claws of ornithologists. He was out in the field. He would study the prairie and observe their behavior and take elaborate notes on a daily basis. And when and then he would try to decide based on the behavior of the birds when they were alive what position he wanted to draw it in. Maybe flying or nesting may be courting whatever it was going to be he would study death first in the living bird. Then he would collect a specimen or two or three. Looking for the healthiest and the most representative. And within 24 hours

of his death would have finished a drawing of it. He said that he put the color of the feathers changed within 24 hours and did because he was out in the wilderness and there were no stores around. He would typically use the specimens for food. He would cook couldn't eat it. So that in the ornithological biography over and over again with all these five hundred species of birds he discusses what they taste like. Again this may seem a little shocking today but I think you have to remember that birds were collected what Autoblog brought to his depiction of birds when City didn't depict them as if they were just fish. He didn't depict them as if they had no feeling life was there. To the contrary I think his real gift to the conservation and environmental movement of it was that he was one of the first to show all these living species creatures as having complex behaviors and lives as protecting their young as courting and loving in a sense.

To a couple of birds living together and then reproduce again. So when he showed them in all the richness of the complex behaviors and in doing so introduced that idea to a world that had not taken very seriously in that. Way. Our guest in this part of focus 580 is Richard Rhodes and he is the author of a newly published biography of Audubon John James Audubon. It's titled John James Audubon the making of an American and published by come often the book is out just now to Richard Rhodes is the author of a number of books including a series that looks at the history of nuclear weapons and he may well be best known for his book The Making of the atomic bomb which won a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction not only that but also National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. As human. Can you talk a little bit of the story about the fact that how he was born he was born in

Haiti his father brought him back to France when he when Aubin was six and then when he was 18 sent him to the United States and I gather he was that his father's father was concerned that Audubon would end up being pressed into the French army and so he decided better to better to send the boy to the United States and have him end up serving under Napoleon. Yes well he didn't want to turn to the cannon fodder and this was his only son. So it was very important to him that his son survived. So he procured him a false passport that he'd been born to Louisiana which had not been kind of covered up his birth because it was a great source of shame in that society at that time to have been born illegitimate. So he often would say he was born in the New World which is technically true since he was born in Haiti. So he came to America at 18 and his father had bought a substantial farm near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania which was called

mill Grove because he was on a lovely little creek and there was a mill down on the creek as well that was part of the property. So for the next couple of years Audubon lived the life of a sort of young country gentleman going to parties and riding horses hunting and collecting birds and studying birds. He was by then fully engaged in the whole idea that he was going to give the rich a new source of birds in America many of which had never been identified or described or even named yet. So it was a great opportunity for him next door. The estate up the hill from Mill Grove English family had just at that time moved in the Bakewell family who were wealthy and substantial and who had come to America basically for religious reasons. To follow the chemist and religious leader Joseph Priestley who had established a colony in pencil. So the big move did just about the time Autobahn moved in the oldest equal daughter Lucy Bakewell was a lovely young woman she was tall

and slim and she had spoken gray eyes that make you upturned English nose and was well educated for it was a young woman of her day in England before she came over was a good horsewoman she rode side saddle even it was a strong swimmer as something of an athlete. So these two handsome intelligent talented young people inevitably met Helen of Audubon actually took the risk of going back to France to get his father's permission to marry her. Risking once again the draft and his father had to create him out of France once more. But by 18 0 8 he and Lucy John James and Mary prepared to move like so many young people at that particular time in American history to move across the Appalachians to Louisville to General Store. We have a couple of callers and like to bring them into the conversation when we do that and we'll start with some one here where we are in Champaign line.

Number one. Hello. Hello I'm learning so much from this. I have two comments and also one question requirements are I have a love birds and I realized that there was no camera so a lot of on draw is to not offend me is the fact that it tastes just like the verse does not offend me. My question is do you think the plane knew the relationship between birds and planes. This one I would like to clarify and I'll hang up and listen to the answers. Thank you so much. And another group of planes. I think that's what the caller said about if she was thinking about the you know what what observing what we can say about the history of flight in the attempts of flight what how observing. What's a relationship with serving birds and then human beings thinking about it first of all think about I wish I could do that and oh I am sure thinking about you know how can. How could I possibly do that.

I live on the shore of the Pacific Ocean and I see birds go by and I still think I wish I could. That is Stroger. It's really too early in the Audubon era for anything to I think past in that regard although Lord knows all the way back to to Leonardo DaVinci there was an effort to try to figure out how to make a plane big basically by looking at the way birds flew. What was happening in those days however and what Audubon saw when he went to France later on in his career to try to get stripers for Birds of America was a hot air balloon. There is a great deal of that going around and it's a story that I tell that I think is truly fascinating about the time modified was in France some Osage Indians had been shipped over by an entrepreneur who was going to just exhibit them around Europe and one of them went up in a hot air balloon and just was willing to go because his particular Jeb his particular clan was the Eagle clan so he knew that he was all right.

Growing up in the air like that. When is when the Osage came back to America one of them said he'd been married three times to the ladies of the French court while he was in prison. So it was really quite an encounter between the Native Americans thought about had hunted with the sage Indians when he was living in Kentucky so he knew that particular group very well. All right let's talk with someone else this color isn't it. Atlanta Illinois Georgia under Wine for Hello good morning. Yes you guys are talking about one of my favorite individuals. So good I might have missed this and trying to calm down. But is it true that Saddam in Mosul was a really great marksman in the fact that that's one of the abilities he had to gather some of your samples and then one other thing that I find might be informant is the state of Illinois has a tremendous collection of Ottoman prints original print that I don't know they're on permanent expedition or X is pison or not but they do travel quite a bit in mainly their prints

that would depict births in Illinois and there just when you see I mean it's just stunning I mean it's just unbelievable those large of prints and that many in one place to look at and then relate them to what you know about it. It's pretty good. I'll ask the question about the marksman ability and you might have covered that and I'll hang up. Thank you very much. Well right out of line was a good marksman he had to be he was firing a smooth bore gun or a shotgun but the shotgun was for small birds basically and he would load it with mustard seed because he didn't want to damage them. If he could avoid it but for larger birds at that height longer distances he fired a muzzle loaded smooth bore gun with lead ball that he dropped in the front end of the thing. He was a very good shot obviously and it was one of the qualities that made him so popular in rural frontier Kentucky because they would have shooting matches.

They would do things like barking a squirrel which would mean shooting at the bark directly below a squirrel in a tree to see if you could knock the squirrel out of the tree. Blood was often a winner at these bouts of those he offered was that the impromptu horse races that they held derbies that they held in the streets of Louisville. Henderson the town he lived from here you know I think it's very interesting to ask the question to jump ahead another one story a little bit. When he arrived in England in the autumn the late summer of 1826 with his portfolio of drawings to find and engage and engraver who could turn his drawings into the big wonderful plates of the Birds of America he knew no one. He had a purse full of letters of introduction but he was basically a totally unknown person. The people in England had never heard of him he had no reputation yet anywhere at all. And within a month or two after he arrived he was like a rock star. He was famous all over the country and people were flocking to the exhibitions of his drawings and the

question really is how did that happen. And one of the answers is when he rented a hall and lined the walls of that room with these three foot by four foot life sized brilliantly colored water color and pencil drawings of birds set in their natural habitat with the trees behind them that they might nest in or feed on or the plants or the shore or water shore where they swam or the lake. When you walked into a room in those days in those days when there were no mechanically reproduced images when everything that was available in the image form was handmade when there were no Adeline. So the world was drab and dark with just vegetable dyes usually dark clothing. When the cities of England were darkened city with coal smoke you walked into a room with this brilliantly colored reproduction of the wilderness around you and I think it would have been like today going to an IMAX theater.

People were simply Tafel by Does it work. They've never seen anything like people didn't draw birds that way before out of but they drew them like little lumps standing on a tree branch. And here was this animated life of creatures. So I think that explains a lot about why he was so great and immediate success when he went to England as he had not been in the United States. Well you talked about the fact earlier when he came to the United States one of the things that he was very excited about was the opportunity to get to know the the flora and fauna of the new place and also to to use his art to depict that and he was. But it seems pretty clear that that the thing that motivated him to do it was the love of doing it. And he he loved doing it and he wanted it to be really good that a periodic Lee as he was developing his skills he would destroy everything that he does. That's right. As as a way to spur himself to doing better the next time so he wasn't thinking about this as a commercial enterprise fact he

really didn't think of himself as an artist until after he failed at business. During the panic of 1819 before that time he had been a runner and an owner and operator of general stores and trader in real estate and had built at great expense with a couple partners who ducked out on him when the when the going got a big steam powered Christe and sawmill on the Ohio River in Henderson Kentucky which was right on the edge of the frontier at the time. So indeed in the prime years of his business activity between 18 and 18 I mean there are very few drawings that. People have accused him of neglecting his business for birds and use that to explain the business failure but to the contrary he neglected his hurting his hobby at that time for business until the panic of 1819 brought all the business that's west of the Appalachians low. It

was not unique to Audubon that he went for a year because the federal government had halted all its loans to federal banks in Philadelphia and called in all its loans to all the new little state banks in the West in order to put together a nuff gold and silver to finish paying the Louisiana Purchase and it had basically caused a financial collapse throughout the entire trans Appalachian West. One of the reasons that Andrew Jackson would be elected president a few years later because the West was so incensed at what it thought of as the Eastern bankers for having destroyed their world. Almost every business west of the Appalachians failed in 18. And it was only then when Audubon had to find another way to support his family that he turned to making black chalk portraits for a living at a time when usually the only way to get a portrait of someone in your family was to pay a thousand dollars or more in modern dollars for an oil painting. He was willing to produce a decent black truck portrait for $5 which would be about $100 today so he quickly was able to make a

living as an artist and that was one of the revelations of experiences that he had at the time that led him to realize he could indeed do that. He had also seen the prince of media predecessor's book of American birds a man named Alexander Wilson and he knew that Wilson was not merely the artist he was he knew that his field observations were as good as gold. And he knew that Wilson had primarily focused on the birds of the Eastern fire way and had not really encompassed in his several volumes of American birds. The numerous species that flew up and down the Mississippi Flyway. So he saw number one that he could make a living and a number two that a predecessor who had sold well had done books that had been financially successful had not covered the entire known or if you will quite subtle part of America yet so Audubon incision the larger work with all the birds life sized on these huge pages and he hoped at that point in the in 18 20

21 he hoped that he could cover the entire continent. As it turned out because there was so much danger in going west in the 1830s he really was never able to get all the way to California. He got as far west of the Rockies but never really crossed the river. So his life experience is what turned him from a hobbyist who was fascinated with wilderness and the natural world into an artist who could take all that knowledge that he had accrued for his own pleasure and turn it into works of art and instruction for the rest of the world. Our guest in this hour focused 580 Richard Rhodes and he's the author of John James Audubon the making of an American a new biography of the artist is published by can often it's just out. And questions are certainly welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 860 me 2 2 2 9 4 5 5. You talked about the fact that oughta been went to Britain and was a smash hit he and his art work were a smash hit became very very famous and celebrated

and that helped. Then he first became famous in England before he came back and became famous in the United States right. His reason though for going to Britain was that this was the time that he was he wanted to have the drawings published and reproduced and apparently there was nobody in the United States that could do it not and not do it the way that he wanted to do it. Yeah. I mean there were people in the United States who could engrave large copperplate like that. But this was a venture that in the end in modern dollars was going to cost two and a half million dollars. At the height of production in London he had an entire workshop engravers printers working and 50 colors who had colored the finished engraved plates to make to put in the watercolor washes. That would make them the full color plates. This was a huge enterprise and it simply was not any publishing institution in this country at that

time capable of handling an enterprise. He knew that as early as 18 21. So he planned and Hugh let's introduce into the story his wife Lucy because Lucy was is someone who's been left out of previous biographies by a large and indeed has been described as some sort of unwilling victim to out of Bond's ambitions who had to endure poverty and separation and indeed had to support their children at one point while he went abroad to get this great work done. That's not the way it happened. I've read through the letters correspondence between these two people who were deeply in love who were married happily for 43 years. When the auto plant decided after the business failure that he was going to take on the screen and work Lucy was it in the U.S. asked to participate in the decision. She saw it as a way first of all to recoup the family fortunes. Second as a way to increase the family's status in America

and perhaps importantly she knew that her husband was deeply shamed and guilty about having failed in business even though he was part of a larger phenomenon. He had no control over and she saw this as a way for him to recompose pride. So she told him I will help you find the money we will. We will both go to work and I will help you put together the stake you need to take this work to England. He started at the same time while you were abroad I will support myself and pay for our schooling for our two children. While youre getting started and then when you are settled and youve got a flow of income from work then I'll come over and join you and we can be together again. So he and she found their way down to Louisiana to the wealthy cotton plantations above New Orleans on the Mississippi River. In those days three good cotton crops made to a millionaire on the Mississippi River. There were more millionaires in that stretch of the river than there were in New York City at the time.

And these people have of course children. They wanted their children to have training in department and the best possible sort of gentlemens and young ladies education. So Lucy started the school on one of the plantations where she taught piano and other subjects to the young women of the of the rich families. And he started a rather more informal operation where he taught fencing to the young men he taught dancing to the whole community. They would they would come in to one of the plantations and clear away clear out one of the cotton barns move the genocide and Mr. Audubon recollect a little sea from everybody and then accompanying himself on his final live. And he would teach the Kotel you which was kind of an early French version of square dancing. He also taught drawing of course so and maybe French as well so between them they went to work to put the money together to get him abroad at the same time in Louisiana he was able to collect maybe 65 or even 100

different species of birds there were so many birds there coming down in the in the winners from the north. You talked about the the how expensive it was simply to have the the plates reproduced millions of dollars just to produce the Birds of America. If if in 1850 you wanted to have a copy what would it have cost. Well the the the selling price of the set at the time was a thousand pounds which translates in modern dollars to about $15000. There went on a bunch started the production of this book of four hundred thirty five three foot by four foot copperplate engravings and colored based on his original drawing. He knew he had to get a cash flow going. And the tradition with this kind of book in those days was that you would hope it would solicit subscribers which he personally went out and did all over England.

You would produce five finished plates. Put these into a portfolio and ship them off to a subscriber who would pay for those five plates. This this unit was called the number they would pay for a number a certain set amount and then five more plates would come as another number in a month or two and so on until the whole sell 100 plates have been accumulated and then they would have them bounded to the first volume of the book and they could have any kind of binding they wanted the robotic robot any kind of scrollwork with a lock is like a lock. So it was this project provided a basic cash flow for the business. But it wasn't enough to pay for this very expensive production process. So Audubon also painted large oil canvas is a natural scenes for the country gentry to put up in their big country houses and sold those for the modern equivalent of 10 or 15. Thousand dollars each. And also later when he was he also had exhibitions of the drawings and then as the plates started to be

available all of the plates as well in the hall surrounding linen would charge admission. So he had these various ways. I mean it's extraordinary to be that this one man had aged this vast operation he said proudly at the end of the 12 year period of production because that's how long it took to make this book he said. I never missed a payroll. Meaning those 50 young women colorist and the predators of the engravers every week made the payroll every week made sure that his engraver Robertson felt Jr. in London had enough drawings to produce the next number. And that meant that he had to go back to America frequently to do new collections to to do more expeditions he went to Labrador. He went into the Flores as he went. He spent a summer at Great Egg Harbor in New Jersey a major nesting place for birds. He went all the way as far west of along the Gulf as the Galveston Bay and even went up to what was then a very raw little little village called Houston and met

met a very raw. President of the new country of Texas named Sam Houston living in a log cabin. He wandered all over America but he he he had the birds he had the drawings he had the paper already. Exactly at the right time the business was never intended by him. He service all the scribes when they fell off the list to go back and convince them to sign on again or if they died he convinced their heirs to sign on it because you know he was a one man band in the most extraordinary way. So if anyone thinks he was about this the spirit they should look at what he did with this work to change their judgment. We have about 10 minutes left maybe a little bit more in this part of focus 580 Our guest is Richard Rhodes. His new book is John James Audubon the making of an American. Published by cop. We have some callers to talk with someone listening in Indiana. Why Number 4 0 0 0 0 1 question. Both you and

and Dave took care of that it was sort of the actual mechanics of the size of the paper and the copper plates and how why it went to England stuff I'd like to carry that on a little further in a more maybe a smaller area in terms of aesthetics. Did they do a number of prints of each plate. And if so how many normally and all. Was there any question later on after the 12 years or over whether or not my prints better than your print because my pink is closer to the pink of the actual bird. That kind of question in the next question is somebody it seems to be fairly important of it in terms of genes passed on is what can you tell us about his mother. I haven't heard anything at all about her is just sort of a you know a lady to procreate from I guess as warm as you can give you more about her. You know you were. His natural mother whose name was being was born in a

village close to not the city that Audubon would grow up in and seems to have passed over to think Dominique because he was called on the same ship that carried autobahns father. So one of his forces. That's probably where they met. But almost nothing else is known about her she was a chambermaid in his father's house. He said he heard later from someone that his mother was extraordinarily beautiful but he tended to make up stories about his childhood and claims that his mother was a Spanish lady in Louisiana because again he was hiding his illegitimacy. So not very much is known about his mother other than as has recently been established where she was or how she when she came to America. Think me should say there were about 200 plates pulled for each of the pages of The Birth of America.

Ultimately there were about a hundred and eighty five original sets of which probably a hundred and twenty or so still survive in their bowed form for many years. It was more profitable to take apart the set and sell the plates individually than to leave them all together in their original binding. Unfortunately though there are for each plate now about 40 individual plates wandering around the world in private in public. But in the year twenty hundred. Christine sold a very fine set of The Compleat found Birds of America to the amir of Qatar for eight point eight million dollars the highest price ever paid for an art book. The emir is building a world class science library and this was to be the jewel in the crown of the library. As a result no one is ever again going to break upsets of the Perth Cup because the finished bound set is worth more than all the individual plates sold separately which I think is good news.

I think one of the reasons a lot of art is not as celebrated as an American artist as I think it should be is because it's so very hard to see his work and his work in his eyes was not the original drawings but rather to copperplate engravings which of course were done by someone else which makes it very difficult for art curators and museums to decide what's the original work. So they tend to put a grave plate up on the wall and listed as by Robert yvel Jr. after John James Audubon. But Audubon didn't think of it that way when he did these these were wonderful wonderful works which are kind of I call them concentrated essence of wilderness. Because it's more than just the depiction of a bird. The depiction of the whole world especially when you see these all together either in sequence in the book or out on the wall. His idea of the finished work was the playwright and his drawings are often unseen issue all of his drawings except a couple that had been destroyed were sold by by Lucy after his death to the New York

Historical Society which still has them. In fact is having an exhibition of some of them next February in New York for people who are interested and they're often not finished. There's often no background. Sometimes there's a pencil note Mr hotel will fill in the background. Sometimes he cuts out a period from one drawing and clues it on to another in the sort of collage so there there really works prepared for the engraver. And I think that's one of the reasons it's been hard for Audubon's to receive the recognition he should. We have another caller let's go here to someone here line number one is listening in Crete Illinois hello. You know this nations is inundated with the bird complex we have the turkey we have the American bald eagle we have Hitchcock's The Birds we just had a new book in just yesterday in The Chicago Tribune on the front page. It was a statement made by scientists saying that chickens DNA offers a great deal him into our past also into the human psychology and physiology.

Yes. So the DNA of the chicken might be another book you might consider. Evidently chickens are about 60 percent the same DNA as we are which surprised any of us. Nature's very conservative revolution. You know I was amazed by the fact that in the time frame in the location frame or the early 19th century in the far west of Kentucky we could have a merger of some very important people. Daniel Boone was probably on his way to Missouri by this time but certainly this was his area. Yes Lewis and Clark are beginning their great journey to the west around 18 4. Abraham Lincoln a young kid someplace in Kentucky was being born about this time and the cost of living for the South and he Jackson's reason help. So we do have a merger in many things here as far as personalities we also have a merger in the case of Audubon with a number of important events of the Haitian revolution and the son of a French revolution of the 1790s the Great

Migration beginning in a 900 century to the United States from Europe. Right. Also the great migration to the west which he in the sense initiated to some extent and the great interest in science especially science in the American frontier. Yes you're absolutely right about all these things. And indeed a lot of us are good friends of William Clark. There were quarks all over Louisville and they became friends throughout their lives. And Mary Todd's father who was a banker wrote a letter of recommendation for Audubon in 1819 when he was looking for a job teaching at a college in Cincinnati. So there really was a great deal of overlap. This brings up the other theme that I've tried to explore in this book that I think again has not been looked at by previous thought about biographers. There was at this time a great migration West. There was at this time starting around eighteen hundred. What the historian Joyce Appleby calls the first generation

of Americans moving out from the east moving out from the type of other part of the United States leaving behind their parents the first generation of Americans young people who for the first time really thought of themselves as Americans. They're parents like first generation immigrants today had thought of themselves perhaps as French or German or English wherever they came from. This new generation really began to get their life experience and changing careers which had really not been possible previously had been part of the tradition of the family moving away from home establishing their own traditions exploring their own possibilities with this great open ended frontier out there as a canvas on which to paint these young people in their life experiences created the or established the kind of qualities that we now think of as the American character. That is to say intense individual the optimism trip and aerial ambitions a certain brashness and

boldness roughness of character that that to this day Europeans attach to us as a people. Audubon's life however unique however distinctive in terms of his particular cast and Lucy's life as well are very representative of this time in American life that has been not much explored by history. But when America came together as a nation and I think that's one of the qualities that people kind can take of the larger subject of Audubon's life beyond simply his his wonderful work as an artist and writer. You speak as well as you write and you can see David why you actually write it because of his spark of interest in these subjects and he has great enthusiasm for you thank you. It's absolutely true I would not disagree at all. We're coming down to the point where we're almost have to finish and I would just again suggest people if they're interested in the subject they should go and they should take a look at the book because it really is a fair for a fascinating story. Maybe again just to get to go to finish up to

this idea that you write about in the book that that one of the reasons that perhaps you're fascinated by Auden is his Howie exemplifies Americans America and America's tendency to to vent themselves. Yes. And there's this sort of this parallel between America and what it is and. That oughta been and he was out of bounds been rather put down for having basically invented a persona for himself even today that's considered a great virtue in most of our celebrities. Just that I think it really came to a focus when he arrived in England because he became the life of everybody's dinner party he was invited out almost every night of the week much to his discomfort and exhaustion because he had to work all day by turning himself into a kind of a rough front here American character I mean he simplified himself. People would ask him to dinner Mr. Audubon could you could you give us an Indian war foop or could you see this give us an owl

call Mr. Audubon. So he would play this kind of game and he had arrived in rough frontier clothes with his hair down to his shoulders very unfashionable books but very front here and that romantic western look if you will. So he played himself in a way. And this was one of the discovery site bait that fascinated me the last of the Mohicans had been published in England about six months before out of honor. And it had been a huge national bestseller people were ready for that step off the boat and that's exactly what happened. But on a deeper level autopilot really came to think of himself again going back to this country becoming a nation at that time. He began to think of itself as an American with a ring that he had made to feel his letters with red wax as they did in those days had his wild turkey cock carved on its head around the rim of the seal was America my country which had become his motto.

So he really did deeply identify with this new and rich and wonderful and extraordinary land filled with wild creatures filled with birds and took that as his character justice. So many other Americans are doing we'll have to leave it there I'm I'm sorry to have to stop. You should read the book it's titled John James Audubon The Making of America published by cops by our guest Richard Rhodes and thank you very much Mr. Read pleasure talking to you.