Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    In the Footsteps of Audubon
    In the Footsteps of Audubon
    In the Footsteps of Audubon
    Ebook389 pages2 hours

    In the Footsteps of Audubon

    By David Allen Sibley and Denis Clavreul

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    An artist’s uniquely personal journey across America

    In the nineteenth century, ornithologist and painter John James Audubon set out to create a complete pictorial record of North American birdlife, traveling from Louisiana and the Florida Keys to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the cliffs of the Yellowstone River. The resulting work, The Birds of America, stands as a monumental achievement in American art. Over a period of sixteen years, recording his own journey in journals and hundreds of original paintings, renowned French watercolorist Denis Clavreul followed in the naturalist’s footsteps.

    In the Footsteps of Audubon brings together some 250 of Clavreul’s stunning watercolors along with illuminating selections from Audubon’s journals and several of his paintings. With pencil and brush in hand, Clavreul turns his naturalist’s eye and painterly skill to the landscapes that Audubon encountered on his travels, and to the animals and plants that Audubon depicted in his art. A passionate ornithologist, Clavreul sketches birds in the wild with rare dexterity, bringing them vividly to life on the page. He documents his encounters along the way with people who live with nature, many of whom are passionately engaged in preserving it, drawing on his insights as both a biologist and an artist to connect the past, present, and future.

    A spellbinding, richly evocative journey, In the Footsteps of Audubon is an invitation to see the natural world as Audubon saw it—and to see with new eyes what it has become today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2022
    ISBN9780691241555
    In the Footsteps of Audubon

    Related to In the Footsteps of Audubon

    Related ebooks

    Nature For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Making of The Birds of America

      Sep 1, 2020

      The Making of The Birds of America
      4 min read

    • Article

      Dendrology For Every Day

      Sep 23, 2021

      Dendrology For Every Day
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Extinct (and Almost Extinct) Birds Of John J. Audubon

      Sep 1, 2022

      The Extinct (and Almost Extinct) Birds Of John J. Audubon
      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Aug 13, 2021

      Books
      4 min read

    • Article

      The List

      Jun 27, 2018

      The List
      2 min read

    • Article

      Process Fernando do Campo

      Aug 23, 2022

      Process Fernando do Campo
      3 min read

    • Article

      Select Exhibition Previews

      Mar 30, 2020

      The National Photography Prize celebrates excellence in photography, and as the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) shares, the award solicits the most innovative and thoughtful photo-based practices from across the country. On 1 May the $30,000 acquisit

      5 min read

    • Article

      Waiting In The Wings

      Nov 3, 2021

      Waiting In The Wings
      5 min read

    • Article

      Taking FLIGHT

      May 31, 2022

      Taking FLIGHT
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Library

      Oct 5, 2023

      The Library
      4 min read

    • Article

      Taking FLIGHT

      May 31, 2022

      Taking FLIGHT
      3 min read

    • Article

      Lessons From Nature

      Sep 4, 2023

      @meganholbeck www.meganholbeck.com I’m amazed by naturalists: the way they can identify birds, plants and animals, and provide explanation, wonder and insight, seems to me like a particularly useful type of magic. It’s one I’m trying to learn by cons

      3 min read

    • Article

      What’s On Near Me

      Mar 30, 2022

      With a nod to the work of Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) – one of Australia’s best-known landscape painters and pioneer of capturing the unique and transient qualities of light in the Australian landscape on canvas – three women artists, Consuelo Cavani

      7 min read

    • Article

      Interview Jonathan Jones

      May 2, 2023

      Interview Jonathan Jones
      7 min read

    • Article

      As Above, So Below

      Feb 28, 2020

      As Above, So Below
      9 min read

    • Article

      Rethinking landscapes

      Feb 16, 2024

      Rethinking landscapes
      4 min read

    • Article

      News Of The Week

      Jun 23, 2023

      News Of The Week
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Library

      Dec 22, 2022

      The Library
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Portrait of Australia

      Oct 30, 2019

      A Portrait of Australia
      2 min read

    • Article

      Painting The Cave

      Dec 10, 2020

      Painting The Cave
      8 min read

    • Article

      An Absurd Little Bird

      Apr 6, 2022

      An Absurd Little Bird
      4 min read

    • Article

      A–Z Exhibitions Australian Capital Territory

      May 1, 2022

      Federation Square, Kingsley Street, Rosevear Place, Treloar Crescent, Ainsle Avenue, Wentworth Avenue, London Circuit, Blaxland Crescent, Wentworth Avenue, Kennedy Street, Parkes Place, King Avenue, King Edward Terrace, Anzac Parade, Kendall Lane, Re

      5 min read

    • Article

      Oh, For A Proper Cup Of Tea!

      Aug 24, 2022

      Oh, For A Proper Cup Of Tea!
      5 min read

    • Article

      Go Wild!

      Sep 22, 2022

      Go Wild!
      6 min read

    • Article

      Audubon’s Exquisite Bird Paintings Owe A Debt To Classical European Art

      May 8, 2024

      When John James Audubon immigrated to the United States from France in 1803, his timing was fortuitous. That same year, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of U.S. territory, deepening national curiosity about what lay in the vastness. Audubon (1

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for In the Footsteps of Audubon

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      In the Footsteps of Audubon - David Allen Sibley

      PROLOGUE

      A CHILDHOOD IN FRANCE

      IT ALL STARTED along the Loire a few miles from Nantes on a beautiful summer day in 1991. Near the village of Couëron I had taken a shaded path that wound its way to the marsh. To my right the hedges were dense and the hillside still pastureland whereas to the left, behind a more sparse vegetation, appeared the first rows of willows and ash trees and the first floodable meadows. The river, very close, was hidden by the trees.

      That day I had come upon and sketched a Eurasian Hoopoe taking a dust bath and, returning to Couëron still under the charm of this observation, I wanted to see La Gerbetière again, the old Audubon family property where the famous painter of American birds lived the best years of his childhood. He spent numerous summers there until the age of eighteen, and, like most of the children at that time, nature was his principal source of entertainment and discovery. But unlike others, he developed an uncommon curiosity to the point of wanting to sketch one day the things that fascinated him.

      The house was closed to the public. I tried to imagine the room of the young man and the stairs that he climbed when returning from his walks, his pockets filled with his finds. The garden was surrounded by an old stone wall, covered in many places by lichens, moss, and ferns. While examining these plants, already present two centuries ago when the laughter of children could be heard on the other side of the wall, I decided that I would go to America one day to discover the landscapes, trees, and birds that enchanted the life of John James Audubon.

      Dog Rose, Striped Shieldbugs, and Black-headed Cardinal Beetles, Couëron, May 24, 2010.

      PENCIL AND WATERCOLOR ON PAPER, 11.42 × 13.78 IN (29 × 35 CM).

      More than ten years passed before I began my first visits to America in the footsteps of this man. My initial project, essentially motivated by the discovery of regions and birds unknown to me, had evolved over the course of years. To it I had added the desire to meet and sketch people who live each day in contact with nature: biologists, farmers, foresters, fishers, and sailors navigating on the rivers. I was hoping that these people would talk to me about their relationship with nature, their delights, their fears about environmental degradation, but also their hopes. I wanted to witness in my own way their daily life and their commitments.

      This book is the culmination of a personal project spread over more than fifteen years. Over the course of a dozen trips to the United States organized between 2003 and 2018, and also in France and in Canada, I have produced hundreds of sketches and watercolors in landscapes as varied as the Florida Everglades, the islands of Labrador, and the immense plains of the Dakotas.

      Each chapter covers one of the regions where Audubon lived and traveled. The book follows the chronology of his life and his expeditions with the exception of the last chapter, dedicated to New York, the city where he landed for the first time in 1804 and where he lived his last days nearly fifty years later.

      All of the watercolors and sketches were made in the field, without the help of photographs. This choice caused many frustrations, considering the multitude of possible subjects, but it allowed me to live more intensely in the moment, to resist the temptation to take everything. Furthermore, in my mind nothing was more valuable than to recreate directly the varied effects of the light and the subtle colors that I saw in nature.

      John James Audubon was born in 1785 in Saint Domingue on a plantation that had recently come into the possession of his father, who was a sailor, captain, soldier, and businessman. John James arrived in Nantes in 1788, at the age of four, three years before Rose, his half sister. We know very little about the daily life of the Audubon family when they left their residence in Nantes and went to stay in the country during nice weather. It is certain, however, that Jean Audubon gave his son works on natural history, among them Buffon’s elaborately illustrated works. The young man drew upon his inspiration there, copying numerous drawings of common species—wagtails, goldfinches, tree sparrows, tits—most of the time in profile and in frozen stances conforming with representations at the time. Many years later he will write about his first drawings:

      When, as a little lad, I first began my attempts at representing birds on paper, I was far from possessing much knowledge of their nature, and like hundreds of others, when I had laid the effort aside, I was under the impression that it was a finished picture of a bird because it possessed some sort of head and tail, and two sticks in lieu of legs; I never troubled myself with the thought that abutments were requisite to prevent it from falling either backward or forward, and oh! what bills and claws I did draw, to say nothing of a perfectly straight line for a back, and a tail stuck in anyhow, like an unshipped rudder.¹

      The young artist, who criticized Buffon’s plates for lacking life, often saw in despair that the bird he had just drawn was unrecognizable.

      He used the technique of three pencils, classic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, combining black stone and red and white chalk. For his preparatory drawings, however, or to obtain softer gray tones, he was already using a new medium, graphite, or pencil lead. He soon added watercolor to his range of techniques.

      Lucid and ambitious, the young Audubon never satisfied himself with the very appreciative comments of family friends. His father’s attitude, more frank and constructive, was much more valuable to him:

      My father, however, spoke very differently to me; he constantly impressed upon me that nothing in the world possessing life and animation was easy to imitate, and that as I grew older he hoped I would become more and more alive to this. He was so kind to me, and so deeply interested in my improvement that to have listened carelessly to his serious words would have been highly ungrateful.²

      Like all passionate children, the young Audubon got through the difficult period of these first lessons.

      La Gerbetière, Couëron, July 23, 2004.

      PENCIL AND WATERCOLOR, 7.87 × 16.53 IN (20 × 42 CM).

      The Couëron marshes, which now extend very near to the family home at La Gerbetière, don’t look like those that we often imagine, wetlands dotted with water lilies, surrounded by reed beds and impenetrable willow groves like those of the Lake of Grand-Lieu situated a few miles south of the Loire River. This vast space is in reality covered with floodable meadows, pastures in nice weather. Water is everywhere, but in the form of a network of ditches and canals. The long rows of trees trimmed into rounded shapes, as well as the hedges and copses, more dense around the edge, give the landscapes their various tones. The majority of this land has been taken over by the river that in Audubon’s time was wider and dotted with small islands and sand banks.

      Male Red-backed Shrike, near Lavau, July 29, 2011.

      PENCIL AND WATERCOLOR, 10.63 × 15.35 IN (27 × 39 CM).

      A few locks allow the quantity of water retained in the marsh to be regulated. I am partial to one of them. It is a beautiful work lost in the middle of the fields, flanked by a lock keeper’s house that I painted more than twenty years ago before it fell into ruin. I have a vivid memory of this place. One day some Grass Snakes slid around me on the granite slabs of the lock while overhead in a uniform blue sky a flock of gulls chased invisible insects in silence. Beyond the locks the start of the sea can just be felt. The water of the marsh flows toward the Loire River along the canals, these strange channels sculpted in the mud by the coming and going of the tides. One can hear the soft cries of the Common Teals as they feed, slowly following the rising current.

      In June 2006 I joined some ornithologists of the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (the French representative of BirdLife International) in order to put a tracking device on a young White Stork, a way to track the migration of this bird all the way to Africa. These naturalists promoted the nesting of this species by building artificial platforms; today around fifty pairs reproduce in the vicinity of the estuary.

      I also met with Jean-Louis Lavigne, a descendant of Rose, the half sister of John James. He proudly spoke to me about the association Audubon Couëron Atlantique, which he created with his friend Jean-Yves Noblet, and of their efforts with other associations to prevent the dumping of mud dredged from the river on the marshes near Couëron, in this way preserving these spaces so rich in biodiversity.

      But the mobilization of naturalists isn’t always enough. Corncrakes no longer nest here, and their numbers have been constantly diminishing in Western Europe for more than a century. Without a doubt the young Audubon could have heard the grating call of this migratory bird, which for a long time was a discrete and very characteristic guest of the marsh.

      Between Couëron and Nantes the landscapes are still composed of a beautiful mosaic of fields surrounded by hedges, woods, and humid valleys. Country lanes skirt the farms, cross some hamlets, and the big city—even though it is close—seems far away.

      In the past Nantes was called Venice of the West because it was crossed by several arms of the Loire River and by the Erdre River, which joins the Loire in the heart of the city. The port was flourishing, the docks ceaselessly active.

      During the long absences of Captain Audubon, his son frequently missed school as a result of the kindness of Anne Moynet, his stepmother.

      Thus almost every day, instead of going to school when I ought to have gone, I usually made for the fields, where I spent the day; my little basket went with me, filled with good eatables, and when I returned home, during either winter or summer, it was replenished with what I called curiosities, such as birds’ nests, birds’ eggs, curious lichens, flowers of all sorts, and even pebbles gathered along the shore of some rivulet.³

      In addition, Anne Moynet wanted to make him a man of the world, in the style of the Old Regime. For a while the young Audubon attended an academy of drawing and painting, followed by classes of dance and music, and, in fact, his good manners, his knowledge of the field of art, and his numerous other talents permitted him, many years later, to create useful relationships easily among the American and English well-to-do social class. In view of the very tense political context in France at the time of the French Revolution, the tenderness and care that his parents gave him certainly made more bearable the winters spent in a city often agitated, sometimes in a very violent manner.

      His first years of adolescence were less happy. He passed more than three years at the Naval Academy at Rochefort, where Jean Audubon had registered him during the summer of 1796, considering that a maritime training program would assure him an honest and profitable livelihood. The young man was very bored, like a bird in a cage. His father, who fifteen years earlier had taken part in the American Revolutionary War, certainly spoke to him of the Marquis de Lafayette, who embarked near Rochefort on the frigate Hermione to lend a hand to the young America and to participate in the victory at Yorktown against the Royal Navy.

      Tagging a young White Stork with a tracking device, Audubon Marsh, June 3, 2006.

      BLACK LEAD, 9.45 × 14.57 IN (24 × 37 CM).

      Snake’s Head Fritillary, Audubon Marsh, March 21, 2003.

      WATERCOLOR, 3.94 × 10.63 IN (10 × 27 CM).

      In 1799, when the Natural History Museum of Nantes opened to the public for the first time, Audubon was fourteen years old and his parents lived in a street close by. A letter recently found indicates that he frequented this place and that the director, François René Dubuisson, introduced him to ornithology.

      Common Shelducks and Black-headed Gulls, along the Loire Estuary, facing the village of Paimboeuf, June 18, 2006.

      PENCIL AND WATERCOLOR, 12.60 × 16.53 IN (32 × 42 CM).

      The slave revolt in Saint Domingue put an end to his father’s activities in the Caribbean. Released from his naval career in 1801, Jean Audubon wished to develop his business in America and thus joined with some businessmen of Nantes already involved in French commerce located in New York, Philadelphia, along the Ohio River, and as far west as Saint Louis. He decided to send his son to his property at Mill Grove near Philadelphia, which he had purchased around fifteen years earlier and on which there seemed to be a very promising vein of lead. Thus the young Audubon abandoned his

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1