John Audubon

I wanted to learn more about John J Audubon, because when I read about how he would hunt different types of birds and shoot them just to be able to paint them the way he wanted to see them. John J Audubon, in order to make his paintings look "life like", would shoot the birds. He would also stuff them and wire them to depict a real bird in its natural environment. Around the age of nine, he developed a love of birds, and sketching them. He painted whatever interested him. Audubon enjoyed looking for birds in western France until he was eleven years old.

Audubon (1785-1851) was born in Les Cayes, Santo Domingo, which is present day Haiti. He was the illegitimate son of Jean Audubon, a French sea captain, and Jeanne Rabin, a chambermaid who died in a slave uprising after his birth. His father remarried to Anne Moynet, Audubon's new stepmother. Audubon's father signed him up for service as a cabin boy in the French navy, because he believed that this would give his son some formal discipline. The military wasn't for Audubon, and so he failed the entrance exam to join the navy. His father, after not wanting his son to join Napoleons' navy, obtained a false passport for Audubon to travel to the United States to avoid the Napoleonic Wars.

Audubon, in order to keep the birds he shot intact, used a fine shot to prevent the birds from being torn to pieces. He later used fixed wires to prop them up, getting a "life like" position. His paintings of birds are set true-to-life in their natural habitat. He killed many thousands of birds.

In 1803, Audubon was engaged to his neighbor Lucy Bakewell whom he would later marry in 1808. Birds included 489 species of birds at about life size. He would later expand that to a 5 vol. text called "The Ornithological Biography (1831-39). In 1839, now living in Manhattan, he released an expanded 7 vol. edition of Birds. In 1845, Audubon released a three part vol. of Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, which contained roughly 150 hand colored lithographs. For this book, Audubon was assisted by his two sons, Victor Gifford Audubon and John Woodhouse Audubon, and John Bachman, who was also a naturalist. Bachman composed much of the text in the book.

By the middle of 1840, Audubon started to lose his eyesight. By 1847, due his body getting old, his career as a naturalist was over. In 1851 John J Audubon passed away in his home