SOURCE: "Audubon's Passion," The New Yorker, 5 February 1991, pp. 96-104.

In 1803, an eighteen-year-old Frenchman who had been born in Haiti, as Jean Rabin, and who had lived in Paris just long enough to take a few drawing lessons and learn how to ice-skate, arrived in New York. For the next seventeen years, he wandered through Pennsylvania and Kentucky and Ohio and Louisiana, pursuing one quixotic money-making scheme after another. Then, in 1820, he was seized by what he afterward called his "Great Idea," and for the next thirty years—until his death, in 1851—he raced from Florida to Labrador, drawing a picture of every American bird and every American beast, beginning with the wild turkey, and including even such minor Americans as the knobbed-billed phaleris, the annulated marmot squirrel, and Richardson's meadow mouse, and ending, five hundred and eighty-four paintings later, with the silvery shrew mole. He signed his work John James Audubon, and became the nearest thing American art has had to a founding father.

Lewis Mumford once described him as an "exuberant French coxcomb" who "changed his silks for leather hunting clothes and let his hair grow down to his shoulders; and … gradually turned into an archetypal American, who astonishingly combined in equal measure the virtues of George Washington, Daniel Boone, and Benjamin Franklin." Already in Audubon's lifetime, his person and his legend had begun to blend backward into the first generations of American patriots. The Vanderlyn portrait of Andrew Jackson that hangs in New York's City Hall, for instance, is a composite—Jackson's head mounted on a drawing of Audubon's body. In the last portraits of Audubon, painted by his son John Woodhouse Audubon, Audubon's light, fencing master's features have even begun to fuse indistinguishably with those of General Washington.

Yet Audubon's strange origins, his slow start, and the long period of shady struggle in his middle years add to the clear, eighteenth-century glow of his legend a more peculiarly nineteenth-century American touch—of frontier purification and renewal and reform. Audubon's self-transformation from the dilettante in a ruffled shirt arriving in America into the American woodsman eventually returning in triumph to France is one of the great awakenings in American biography. In his poem "Audubon: A Vision and a Question for You," Robert Penn Warren called this transformation a "passion," lending a Christian overtone to the story of Audubon's rebirth in the wilderness.

In the popular imagination, Audubon remains an archetypal American, though perhaps he now stands on the second shelf of American curios—somewhere between Betsy Ross and Johnny Appleseed. Although the last couple of years have marked no particular Audubon occasion and seen no Audubon exhibitions, he has still been the most visible of all American artists. [In 1990] Wellfleet Press reprinted the octavo edition of Birds of America, to complete a republication program that began in 1989 with the reproduction of Audubon's Quadrupeds, so that now, for the first time, both of Audubon's master pieces are available in cheap editions in something like their original form. Then, later last year, the Audubon Society arranged for the republication of Roger Tory Peterson's "Baby Elephant" folio of Birds of America, in which the birds have been reorganized along modern ornithological lines. Also, Dover Books has republished Audubon's accounts of his trips to Europe, the Missouri Valley, and Labrador, and Alice Ford's exhaustive biography, out of print for more than two decades, was republished in 1988 by Abbeville.

With his reputation as the father of bird sanctuaries and the begetter of the duck postage stamp, however, Audubon the artist has become more familiar than really known. We come to him sideways, repeating by rote a set of pious attitudes that his successors have intoned (nature true, nature wild, nature as it really is) and then catching out of the corner of our eye the uncanny intensity of his art—its haute-couture theatricality and ecstatic animation, its pure-white backgrounds and shadowless, cartoonish clarity—which still proves so unexpected that we are inclined either to explain it away as technique or write it off as naivete. Yet to turn the pages of even the inadequately printed Wellfleet volumes is to recognize that Audubon remains the supreme stylist of American art, and that his formal daring enabled him to achieve a new kind of emotional concentration, which invested each of his birds and beasts with some heightened facet of his own complicated character.

Audubon was not an abstract artist, and he wasn't a mere patternmaker, but he recognized that his greatest achievement was the invention of what he referred to, modestly but pointedly, as "my style"—an American idiom as pared-down, sturdy, and adaptable as a Shaker box. (It was a style so knowingly wrought that he could teach it to John Woodhouse and trust him to execute and complete many of the last plates in Quadrupeds in a manner almost, though not quite, indistinguishable from his own.) The current flood of Auduboniana reaches us today in a time when an uncertainty about the future of the American wilderness, which Audubon made his subject, reinforces a larger uncertainty about American manners and American appetites—about the origins of our picture of ourselves. So the questions that we put to Audubon, perhaps like those we put to any founding father, both increase in urgency and simplify in form, and have now become one indivisible question, half biographical and half formal: what was it in the man that produced the passion, and what was it in the passion that produced the style?

Everyone agrees that Audubon was French and was a nearly compulsive liar; everyone also agrees that he was an archetypal American and was obsessed with scientific truth. The conventional, idealizing accounts make those Audubons successive ones, but the truth seems to be that Audubon was all these things at once. The two roles he liked best to play were the aristocratic Frenchman with a mysterious past and the simple American man of the woods. What is amazing is how gracefully he managed to inhabit both inventions, and how quickly he could exchange one for the other.

Audubon was not a small or a mean liar—he is extremely reliable on the details concerning his animals—but he had a vivid imagination, and when he was depressed he liked to entertain or console himself by making up stories about his origins, his history, and his adventures. He lived with these stories, and eventually they began to slip out in public. He suffered from folie circulaire: one day he would sign a letter to his wife "The Great, the Wonderful Audubon"; the next he would sink into despair.

The most ambitious lie Audubon seems to have told was about his own birth: that he was the lost Dauphin of France, whisked out of prison during the Revolution and entrusted to the care of a loyal seaman. The development of this story is typical of the process of Audubon's self-inventions. It turns up in his surviving journals for the first time when he is in France in 1828, trying to find subscribers for the first edition of Bfrds. After a particularly discouraging day, he writes, "I walk the streets. I bow! I ask permission to do this or that!… I, who should command all." (Alice Ford thinks that his journals were bowdlerized by his granddaughters, in order to emphasize the Dauphin legend. But the fantasy is entirely in Audubon's style; only twenty-five years ago someone as hard-nosed as Mumford thought there might be something to it.) The legend is interesting not so much for its absurdity as for the way it combines his two national modes: the story may use French stock properties, but it is an American story, a tall tale. It places Audubon, properly, in both his worlds—halfway between Marie Antoinette and Mark Twain.

The truth about Audubon's origins may reveal why he found the Dauphin story so seductive. His father, Jean Audubon, was a sea captain. (Audubon made him an admiral; eventually, he would have him fighting with General Washington at Valley Forge, although—as Audubon perhaps knew, perhaps did not—no battle took place there.) Captain Audubon became a slave trader in Haiti. He left behind a wife in France, and took a series of mistresses. One of them, a Jeanne Rabin, gave birth to a boy in 1785. Audubon's father accepted the boy fully, though in the father's papers the son is referred to, flatly, as "Jean Rabin, Creole of Saint-Domingue." Haiti (Saint-Domingue then) was a violent place, and Audubon's father had intimations of the revolt that would erupt there in 1790. Just before it began, he took two of his illegitimate Saint-Domingue children (there was at least one other) back to France, where they were embraced by Mme. Audubon. So the Dauphin story is a truth told slant: Audubon's birth was, in a sense, mysterious, and the lie allowed him to make the story of his illegitimacy glorious rather than shaming.

The Audubons arrived home, in Nantes, in the middle of the Revolution. Audubon's father, slave dealer and plantation owner, made an about-face and became a fanatical Republican. He turned into a kind of Jacobin commissar in the area, responsible for writing up reports on the loyalty of the region's towns and villages. Though Audubon lived in Nantes in some luxury—for the rest of his life he loved fancy clothes, parties, skating, dancing, violin playing—he was always aware of the violence around him. Another of his repeated stories was that he had seen one of his aunts dragged through the streets during the Revolution and murdered; the truth is that none of his aunts were murdered, and in any case, his father was more likely to have been the one doing the dragging.

In 1789, Audubon's father, on a trading expedition, had stopped in Pennsylvania and—partly because he thought there was a promising vein of lead on the property—bought a farm, outside Philadelphia, called Mill Grove. In 1803, Audubonpre shipped Jean to America to save him from being conscripted into the Napoleonic armies (the senior Audubon had by now become a fanatical Bonapartist, though not one inclined to have his son fight). By then, Pennsylvania seemed to occupy a special place in the lore of the Audubon family. In Haiti and in France, the Audubons had been surrounded every day by cruelty—the horrors of the slave system, and then the excesses of the Revolution. Pennsylvania, by contrast, was a safe place, a treasure house, a big back yard. For Audubon, the opposition between the Old and the New World was not one that balanced elegant European artificiality against the honest and limitless wilderness. Instead, it set the violence and danger of the Old World against the promise of safe bourgeois comforts and pleasures in America.

Audubon remained all his life unmistakably French. He spoke with an impenetrable Inspector Clouseau accent. (Someone who ran into Audubon long before he was famous transcribed his speech just because it sounded so funny: "Hi emm en Heenglishmen," he has Audubon saying, "becas hi got a Heenglish wife.") The grammar of all his writings, though cleaned up by various editors, was always that of his first language. His vision remained French, too. All his life, he claimed that before he left for America he had studied drawing in the atelier of Jacques-Louis David. While older biographies accepted this as gospel, Ford finds it improbable. If it was a lie, though, it must have concealed another kind of truth. Audubon told the story to people who could easily have checked up on him, and he repeated it in the private journals that were intended only for his beloved wife, Lucy: "I had studied under the instruction of the celebrated David," "the pupil of my old master, David," "the lessons which I had received from the great David." Perhaps Audubon had told Lucy that story while he was courting her ("We are what we make ourselves," Audubon wrote once; it could have been the family motto) and was stuck with it.

Still, if he wasn't trained by David, he was certainly schooled in his style. At a low moment in his life, he made a living by drawing charcoal portraits entirely in the linear, neoclassical manner that David had perfected. That manner couldn't have been a stranger springboard for someone who wanted to draw birds and mammals in their natural habitats. John Constable, nearly an exact contemporary of Audubon, said once that if David's shallow, artificial, theatrical style ever became widely accepted, it would mark the end of nature painting in England. But for Audubon the vague intimations of the sublime were indistinguishable from the blurry generalizations of ignorance; he called the early Romantic landscapes and bird pictures he saw in England "washy, slack, imperfect messes." He took it for granted that the hard-edged draftsmanship of French neoclassicism was the one good grammar of art, and he remained faithful to it all his life. (He had the advantage, too, of a parallel tradition, exemplified by the flower painter Redoute, that married the precision of neoclassicism to scientific illustration. Redoute was almost the first painter in Paris to whom Audubon showed the early drawings of Birds of America.) Audubon's animals are, in a way, distant off-spring of the profile figures in the Death of Socrates, and the diorama-like boxes in which so many of his birds are suspended are a miniaturization of David's sober stage spaces. Audubon's paintings, like L'Enfant's designs for Washington, D.C., were one of those early American achievements that developed an overblown Romantic eccentricity from a strict French neoclassical model.

Audubon also inherited the French mania for the systematic. He couldn't paint one shrike without thinking about the next one, around the corner. He was a catalogue waiting to happen; he said that as a teenager he had tried his hand at a Birds of France. Though the idealized account has him throwing off his "coxcomb" sophistication in America to become a birdman and an artist, submitting himself humbly to the discipline of science and nature, the truth seems to be almost the reverse. Drawing birds, making art, inventing catalogues, producing beautiful books—all these things he thought of as French, and part of his "aristocratic" past. (An early attempt at an American bird catalogue, which Audubon might have known, had been made by another emigre Frenchman.) For Audubon, a real American was someone who went out into the woods and came back with a fortune. He wasted the first sixteen years of his life in the United States trying to become such an American, and it was only when every circumstance conspired against him, and drove him back to the French manner he had intended to abandon, that he at last found his way.

Audubon's enduring strength and weakness was his grandiosity. Immediately after his arrival in Pennsylvania, he fell in love with a beautiful local girl named Lucy Bakewell. His love for her remained the single ennobling passion of his life. (He courted Lucy in a cave, and took her to watch pewees, wearing fancy shirts that he had had made at the best haberdashery in Philadelphia—a typically Audubonian combination of Eagle Scout and Beau Brummel.) When the lead mine at Mill Grove had to be sold (Audubon claimed that he was swindled out of it), he found another large ambition—to become a retail tycoon. In 1808, he any Lucy were married, and they set out for Louisville, Kentucky, where he and a partner had gone into business as drygoods merchants.

When Audubon arrived in Louisville, it was already a stable, mercantile, provincial city. He had to make regular trips back East on business, and it was during these trips—not trailblazing journeys away from the city and into the wilderness but trips from one town to another through well-charted country—that he drew many of his first American birds. His ecstatic sense of American nature had from the beginning a touch of the outing and the expedition—a sense of the wilderness as a park between two houses.

Audubon loved to watch birds. But his was not the spirit of so many present-day birders, for whom the birds might just as well be stamps or baseball cards. He was drawn to them as familiars, and he was interested in them as social animals. (Lucy Audubon once said, "I have a rival in every bird.") In his journals (and in his collections of bird biographies as well), what he chooses to describe is almost never the markings or the profiles—the appearance—of birds. What interests him is their behavior, their habits, their movements—the "manners" of birds, as he called them. Here he is on a trip to Labrador, describing the varied reactions of birds to a rainstorm: "The Great Blackbacked Gull alone is seen floating through the storm, screaming loudly and mournfully as it seeks its prey; not another bird is to be seen abroad; the Cormorants are all settled in the rocks close to us, the Guillemots are deep in the fissures, every Eider Duck lays under the lee of some point, her brood snugly beneath her opened wings, the Loon and the Diver have crawled among the rankest weeds, and are patiently waiting for a return of fair weather, the Grouse is quite hid under the creeping willow, the Great Gray Owl is perched on the southern declivity of some stupendous rock." It is like the opening of Bleak House—a portrait of the weather in a world, and of the characters within it.

The dry-goods store soon failed, and for sixteen years Audubon moved around Kentucky and Ohio and Louisiana. The Audubons had four children, two girls and two boys, and Audubon cheerfully set himself up in one unrealistic project after another. They all ended in debts and recriminations, with the again unsuccessful capitalist wandering off to watch swallows.

In 1810, Audubon had been introduced to a Philadelphia ornithologist named Alexander Wilson, who was planning a complete catalogue of American birds. Audubon recognized that Wilson's drawings were niggling and undramatic compared even with his own roughest sketches, but he would probably never have made bird painting his occupation if he had not gone finally and irredeemably bankrupt in 1819. This last bankruptcy was the consequence of a crazy scheme of his to build a mill and run a steamboat in a little Kentucky town called Henderson. It went so badly that Audubon ended up in a local jail for a few nights. He had persuaded a recent English emigre named George Keats to invest money in the plan. Some of the money belonged to George's brother, John, who was back in England, writing poems. The venture helped ruin Keats, and the name Audubon tolls in his letters like a funeral bell: "I cannot help thinking Mr Audubon a dishonest man" and "Mr Audubon has deceived you."

Bankrupt, Audubon began to make a living by drawing charcoal portraits of local merchants, at five dollars a profile. Many of the profile portraits that he was asked to draw were made on the sitter's deathbed. He was once even asked to draw the portrait of a child exhumed from the grave, and make her look beautiful and alive. He was thirty-five years old, and he had failed at everything else. It must have been heartbreaking to know the Audubons at that moment. They were a subject for a Tennessee Williams play: the overworked and beautiful and distressed mother (both of her daughters had died, one just around the time of the bankruptcy), and the young man with the accent and the frayed lace cuffs, still talking compulsively about his studies with David, about his admiral father, about his mysterious birth.

He was thrown back on his birds. They were all he had left, and Lucy thought there might be a little money in them. "It seems my Genius (if I have any) was intended that way," he wrote to her sadly. Then, cheering up, as he always did, he added that he would present the drawings to "the High Judges of Europe." In the 1820s, he perfected the new way of drawing birds that he called his style. He eventually placed on his drawings and watercolors the notation "Drawn from nature," but that was shorthand for a long and contrived process. Audubon would shoot his birds—sometimes hundreds at a time—and then skin them and take them home to stuff and paint. That was what every bird painter did. But Audubon hated the unvarying shapes and Roman-coin profiles that traditional taxidermy produced, so he began to make flexible armatures of bent wire and wood, and he arranged bird skins and feathers—sometimes even whole, uneviscerated birds—on them in animated poses. That is why his birds look, in every sense, so wired. He would paint a bird in a single session, recording the outline of the invented pose in firm brushstrokes and then filling in between, like a child with a coloring book, in bright, generalizing watercolor. "My plan," he wrote, "was to form sketches in my mind's eye, each representing each family in their most constant and natural associations, and to complete those family pictures as chance might bring perfect specimens." Over the years, he accumulated not so much a jumble of nature notes and sketches as a vocabulary of firmly delineated, stylized, and even artificial shapes.

In time, Audubon began to refine these "family pictures" into a few simple formats. He invented organizing stories on which he could pin little feathery truths: petrels and terns seen from overhead, as chevrons; upright water birds, their long throats always curving close to their bodies in compressed arabesques; songbirds spread out flat, like bats. For these shapes to be articulate, they had to be seen whole and clear and close up, and so, for all their vivacity, they also began to take on an obviously "studio" quality. (Around 1824, Audubon decided that they would have to be printed life-size—an almost unprecedented conception.) It is impossible to imagine any rational point of view from which the birds might have been seen in nature; his flamingos and herons and swans fill the frame of the picture from top to bottom, as if they had come indoors to sit for the artist. Pure, isolated shapes set against a white background, they become symbols of themselves.

When Audubon had to include more than one bird (a mate or a variant) in a single drawing, he often rejected the conventional compositional system of elegantly varying the poses and places of his subjects. Instead, he repeated a single shape, varying only its size, or "pinning" it down on the background in a new way, as Matisse later did with his fixed shorthand of cutouts. Sometimes this exact repetition of forms can create an odd mixture of geometric abstraction and backwoods lyricism: in the drawing of two violet-green swallows, the same chevron is almost mechanically replicated, so that the echoing shapes, placed beside each other with a chevron of white in between, form an implied fan shape of happy green union. And sometimes the repetition can be comic, as when the little female snakebird thrusts her long throat out in exact imitation of her open-beaked mate, all the while curled safely just beneath him. At other moments—for example, in his drawing of two petrels—Audubon will spin or rotate a fixed schematic shape to show its back or its underside, so that the picture, with a single form rotating across it, is like a stop-action photograph. Yet Audubon's birds always reveal themselves (the undersides of his ducks, the splayed-out bodies of his cocks) without being reduced to specimens.

Audubon's birds were more high-keyed in color than almost any other American art would be until the next century. They were flatter, too, since modeling depends on the kind of slow graying-out of tone that Audubon thought would distract from his precise notation of the birds' true colors. (This flatness was noticed and attacked in his lifetime.) Flatness is in bad odor right now, and it is hard to recall that there was a time when it was an empirical, rather than a metaphysical, issue in American art—a problem of light instead of virtue. In most American abstract painting, flatness produces brightness; in Audubon's art, brightness produced flatness. Audubon had invented an imaginary, unnaturally radiant light of a kind that was not seen again in descriptive art until the photographs of Avedon and Penn in the fifties: the searching, even illumination that fills in detail and casts a staring, blank white light along smooth surfaces—a light at once blinding and particularizing. Sometimes, as with the flamingos and herons, Audubon's light is like light at noon on a white sand beach, picking out each grain of sand, yet still unifying the scene in an all-over, shadowless brightness. Audubon made American light tropical.

Earlier European bird books had been hierarchical, with the birds lined up by status. Audubon's birds come at us, for the most part, in democratic disorder, and so can be taken only as individuals. We judge them, as Americans are supposed to judge other Americans, by their character. (A Martian coming upon Audubon's birds would have absolutely no notion that birds use feathers for camouflage.) Audubon saw that the behavior of birds, their instinctual code of greetings and seductions, could be recorded as affectations: the heron's dainty, bent-wristed greeting to its fellows; the red-necked grebe sapiently lecturing its child; the great homed owls staring down their accusers. Mated birds in Audubon are not slaves of instinct but married couples; they are always in cahoots. Or else his birds stand alone in fancy dress and become worldly types: the senatorial pelican, the demagogic shrike, the seigneurial blue heron, the outlaw vulture. Even in his lesser paintings, the birds can be struck off in characterizations of the kind that filled his notebooks as humors: the peevish scaup duck, the proud egret, the suspicious snowy owls, the wise-guy cormorant, the hysterical whooping crane, the serene violetgreen swallows. Although Audubon is famous as the first bird painter to show birds in their environments, and eventually began to have various landscape painters—among them Joseph Mason and, later, George Lehman—assist him by painting backgrounds, in his greatest bird pictures his subjects completely dominate the environments. They don't fill a natural niche; they oversee an estate, assuming poses that in European art had been allowed only to the landed gentry standing in their parks, their stately homes off in the distance. It may be that in a democratic culture only things that come by their beauty naturally—birds or models or movie stars—are permitted to be shown with such aristocratic self-importance. Audubon's snowy heron, with its bald head and noble posture, is so large and commanding that it can only be taken as the owner of the Colonial estate in the background.

If Audubon's birds are subjects rather than specimens, they are never merely allegorical or archetypal; their very birdness forbids that. They are, above all, alive, and their wildness seems to exist—and to be recorded by him—for its own sake. It bums through in their beady, wide-open, wondering eyes, their thrusting serpentine necks, their chattering mouths—a whole new language of recorded ardor. Audubon's birds are always glamorous and always greedy. His swan is unlike any earlier swan in art—not "graceful" or raising its wings, like the swans he described in the parks in France, but sharp-eyed, grasping, its ugly black-webbed foot propelling its beautiful ivory body forward, its eye on the main chance.

"Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of 'scientific' knowledge joins the opposite slope of 'artistic' imagination?" Vladimir Nabokov, another emigre with a love of American wildlife, asked once about Audubon. (Nabokov didn't think that Audubon's occasional drawings of butterflies walked along that ridge.) But at least in his birds Audubon walked along it more bracingly and with a finer equilibrium than any artist before or since. He sought facts—the exact things, peculiarities—and found them by inventing a style. In Audubon, the patterning impulse and the explanatory impulse were always the same. "What is love?" Robert Penn Warren wrote in his poem about Audubon. "One name for it is knowledge."

In 1826, Audubon traveled to Europe, carrying the first set of watercolors for Birds of America. (He thought that there were not enough potential subscribers in America to pay for the book, and also that there was no one here who could engrave it properly.) Armed only with a few standard letters of introduction, he went first to Liverpool. The bird paintings were an enormous success there, and he went on to Edinburgh, where he found the first of his engravers, W. H. Lizars. Lizars began to produce sample plates using the aquatint process—a tonal printing technique that translated Audubon's drawings into big compositional areas and increased their blocky, Japanese-woodcut quality. Later, Audubon rather callously traded in Lizars for a still better engraver, a Londoner named Robert Havell, who further sharpened the clarity of the watercolors. Looking for an ornithologist who could supply the necessary scientific expertise for the text, Audubon went back to Scotland and eventually found a toughminded young naturalist named MacGillivray, who wound up editing most of Audubon's writings on birds. Then he went to Paris, and managed to get King Charles X and much of his court to subscribe to Birds. Audubon understood that while in America it paid him to be very French, in France it paid him to be very American—the noble rustic rather than the rusticated noble. He claimed that when the painter Gerard (an authentic student of David's) saw some of his Birds, he cried, "Who would have expected such things from the woods of America?" In the salons of Paris, Audubon at last became an American.

Birds of America was a multinational effort, and in the end was more European than American—French style and English technique and Scottish realism presiding over the creation of a picture of the New World. For the next decade, while Birds was being produced, Audubon spent about as much time in Europe as he did in America. (The last two years of the project, from 1837 to 1839, he spent almost entirely in England, supervising Havell's engravings and writing the last of a series of accompanying essays.) Birds appeared between 1827 and 1838, in irregular installments of five plates, along with a series of complementary volumes, the Ornithological Biography, which was issued between 1831 and 1839. By 1835, Audubon was an international celebrity. He lunched with presidents, met famous authors, and wrote, "I have laboured like a cart Horse for the last thirty years on a Single Work, have been successful almost to a miracle in its publication so far, and am now thought a-a-a-(I dislike to write it, but no matter, here goes) a Great Naturalist!!!"

He had enemies. Philadelphia, where he had started his American life, was filled with other, more skeptical naturalists, who had an intellectual investment in the Scottish precision and plainness of Alexander Wilson's more drily "scientific" catalogue of birds. They recognized, perceptively, that beneath the illusion of empirical truth in Audubon's work, increasingly surrounded, as it was, by a pious P.R. atmosphere of expedition-making and sample-gathering (at one point Audubon even had a navy man-of-war take him on a drawing expedition), there lay a not very well concealed element of melodramatic fantasy. One Philadelphian, the naturalist George Ord, mounted a vicious campaign against Audubon, which continued relentlessly for the rest of Ord's life. Audubon's critics attacked the "frenzy and ecstasy" that he showed for his subjects. Fortunately for him, the cases that his critics chose to make an issue of—for instance, whether the nest of the mockingbird could ever actually be invaded by a rattle-snake, as Audubon had shown it to be—were ones on which Audubon happened to have the goods. (It could have turned out differently.)

Audubon shrewdly recognized that the way to cash in on his fame was to release a second, affordable edition of Birds, and between 1840 and 1844 he published an octavo edition, several times smaller. It sold extremely well; its seven volumes sat on American shelves as a reassuring presence—a kind of museum of a wilderness that was already becoming remote. The octavo edition of Birds was one of the books that helped invent America. It is hard to recall how regional all America's ideas of place were until after the Civil War—how rooted in the love of a state, a provincial locality. Although Audubon's birds, of course, belong to particular places, and although the landscape artists he employed tried to show particular locations, Audubon saw America as an idealized whole. The Audubon family had reached across America, traveling from north to south, from New York to Boston to Florida to Ohio, and Audubon's compositions—the unchanging light, and blank, cloudless skies, and long, uninterrupted horizons—are recognizably American without ever being quite situated. This almost mystical idea of Americanness, expressed as a spare, underpopulated thinness, an endless backdrop, begins in Audubon and continues right through to John Ford Westerns and to Georgia O'Keeffe.

Every bird or animal picture book before had tried to make a point beyond the blind, flat empirical record; for Audubon, the enrichment of the empirical record was all the point there was. The French naturalist Buffon's ornithology was structured to mimic the surrounding social order—the noble birds first and the lesser ones behind. Audubon's book begins in medias res, with the wild turkey, proceeds to the songbirds, and then abruptly turns to the lyrical swallows, the arctic terns, the water birds. The sequence loosely follows Audubon's own voyages and discoveries as much as any biological program—a kind of autobiography written in birds. He took the French mania for systematization and made it into a recognizably American love of facts for their own sake—single observations connected by "ands."

Pictures of birds are, like pictures of babies, easy to love. Audubon's beasts—or Viviparous Quadrupeds of North Americs, to give them their proper name—have never been as popular as his birds. The only critic to recognize their power and what is in some ways their superiority was Edmund Wilson, who devoted one and a half uncharacteristically rapturous pages to them in Patriotic Gore, under the chapter heading "Poetry of the War." Perhaps what drew him to Audubon's beasts was their unsentimental realism and their violence. The first bird to appear in Quadrupeds is dead—a partridge being mouthed by a fox, which, torn between fear and greed, is staring back at an unseen hunter. The accompanying text that Audubon wrote, in collaboration with the naturalist John Bachman, tells what happens to the fox when the hunter releases his dog:

The Fox has no time to double and shuffle, the dog is at his heels almost, and speed, speed, is his only hope for life. Now the shrill baying of the hound becomes irregular; we may fancy he is at the throat of his victim … every bound and plunge into the snow, diminishes the distance between the fox and his relentless foe … One more desperate leap, and with a sudden snappish growl he turns upon his pursuer.… For a moment he resists the dog, but is almost instantly overcome. He is not killed, however, in the first onset; both dog and fox, are so fatigued that they now sit on their haunches facing each other, resting, panting, their tongues hanging out, and the foam from their lips dropping on the snow. After fiercely eyeing each other for a while, both become impatient—the former to seize his prey, and the latter to escape. At the first leap of the fox, the dog is upon him; with renewed vigour he seizes him by the throat, and does not loose his hold until the snow is stained with his blood, and he lies rumpled, draggled, with blood-shot eye, and frothy open mouth, a mangled carcass on the ground.

Desperate leaps, panicky darting and plunging, hanging tongues and foaming lips, fierce eyes—these are constants of Quadrupeds. Violence, seen with a curious equanimity, almost a kind of relish, is the leitmotiv. There are many trapped animals: the red fox with his hind leg caught in a steel jaw, his body turned in an oddly composed and graceful twist of pain; the Canada otter betrayed by his own greed, his small, delicate paw still reaching for the fish after the trap has snapped shut, his mouth turned toward us, screaming in disbelief. (The trapped otter was an obsessive image for Audubon. He first imagined it in the early 1820s, and drew and painted it many times after.) Other animals scream to create fear: the wolverine, with his wrinkled nose, who stretches open his fanged mouth to intimidate some unseen predator (the prints are filled with unseen predators: noises off); the mink, with its beautiful sleek body and ugly webbed feet, who turns away from his arching mate to howl; the plumed-tail skunk snarling to defend her young hidden in a tree hollow. Instead of using aquatint, Audubon had the beasts printed as lithographs, so that in place of the animated contours of the birds there are soft, blurred edges of fur and microscopically particularized curling hairs. The light in Quadrupeds is less intense and even than in Birds; it is soft but shadowless, sculpting out breasts and muscular bodies.

In the endless plates of small rodents and moles and shrews, which fill the book, the violence is less explicit, but they have a lurid, horror-movie quality anyway. The common American shrew moles, for example, with their weird, flapping paws and obscene blind faces, seem to be casing the little American farmhouse in the background like extraterrestrials stalking a schoolyard. Sometimes this same note of panic becomes vaguely comic: Wilson's meadow mice, delicately and improbably separating the high grass on their little hill to peer out for enemies; the marsh hare and his mate looking dolefully away from each other, like an old Beckett couple; the Canada pouched rats, meeting and exchanging battle stories like a team of exhausted football players. Tree animals are allowed almost the only moments of calm: the orange-bellied squirrels meet in the notch of a tree and stare at each other; the wise and fat raccoon looks down from a tree and scratches his head. The movement of the birds is upward: limbs lift, heads turn, beaks point. The mammals move down, in little, burrowing worm shapes.

The violence that marks Quadrupeds is also the dominant note of Audubon's wilderness journals, but the slaughter of birds and animals, which is the theme of the journals, has, in retrospect, a justification in Audubon's work: the birds and beasts bought with their deaths immortality for their kind. "On leaving the wood we shot a Spruce Partridge leading her young," he writes. "On seeing us she ruffled her feathers like a barnyard hen, and rounded within a few feet of us to defend her brood; her very looks claimed our forbearance and clemency, but the enthusiastic desire to study nature prompted me to destroy her, and she was shot, and her brood secured." The relentlessness of Audubon's descriptions of his slaughters and the almost giddy excitement that the killing inspires in him lend an underside to his accounts which is genuinely alien to modern sensibilities; sometimes the journals have an almost drunken violence, and read like an ad for the National Rifle Association: "Next, Sprague shot an adult yellow-winged male, with the markings principally such as are found in the Eastern States. Harris then shot a young Redshafted, just fledged, with a black stripe on the cheek. His next shot was a light-colored Red-shafted male, with black cheeks, and another still, a yellow Red-shafted with a red cheek. After all this Mr. Culbertson proposed to run a sham Buffalo hunt again. He, Harris, and Squires started on good horses, went about a mile, and returned full tilt, firing and cracking. Squires fired four times and missed once. Harris did not shoot at all; but Mr. Culbertson fired eleven times, starting at the onset with an empty gun, snapped three times, and reached the fort with his gun loaded."

Audubon threw himself into Quadrupeds with a passion that surprised even his family. But he fell ill when the book was about half completed; contemporary accounts of the illness sound like a clinical description of the progression of Alzheimer's disease. He became "crabbed, uncontrollable," demanded kisses, and called for old French songs. At the end of his life, he fell into a silent reverie, and was roused only once, when an old friend came to visit, and Audubon suddenly called out, "Yes, yes, Billy! You go down that side of Long Pond, and I'll go this side, and we'll get the ducks."

Audubon was buried in Manhattan; there is a monument to him in Trinity Church Cemetery, on 155th Street. In the hundred and forty years since his death, many of his admirers have tried to translate his example into a conservation program. (The details of this translation, and all its accomplishments, are related in Frank Graham, Jr.'s new book about the National Audubon Society. The Audubon Ark published by Knopf.) Yet the more time one spends in Audubon's company, the more certain it seems that the mission of the society that bears his name—to protect birds and other wildlife—would not have stirred him much. Today, it seems, we can see wild creatures only as waifs or wards; Audubon's wild creatures are always sure of themselves—are never appealing to or looking for a protector. He loved them because they were not needy. It's hard to imagine Audubon within the Audubon Society: once his subjects had to be protected, the splendor that drew him to them in the first place would be gone.

But if Audubon is a relic as a "scientific" naturalist, as a naturalist in the other, literary sense he is still alive. He was the first American artist to look at abundance and see isolation. His animals do not belong to a large "ecology" or have a rank within a secure hierarchy. Instead, their life is lived in a constant present, in which they are always watchful. The only respite comes when an animal is with its mate. Audubon is a poet of married life, who pictures twoness as mutual protection, a midpoint around which a hostile world revolves. His pictures of mated animals can have a horrible delicacy, as in the wonderful plate of two black vultures cuddled within each other's wings and about to peck out and share the eye of a dead deer, or in the plate of a barn owl coming home on a starry winter night, climbing up a branch and opening his beak with delight as his mate turns her head coquettishly, and lifts her snowy-white wing to reveal the hanging squirrel they will share for dinner.

Audubon's passion produced a style by transforming his extravagances into a chastened, dispassionate-seeming language of hard facts, through which the original ardor still shines. The outward sign that his ardor settled on was simply stylized movement; it seems right that George Balanchine thought that Audubon's art could be the subject of a ballet—for forty years, he and Lincoln Kirstein planned to collaborate on a Birds of America ballet. (A score exists, by Morton Gould, and bits and pieces of the plan can be reconstructed from accounts by Balanchine's biographer.) The ballet would have turned on the Dauphin legend: the rightful king wandering in America and creating a court of birds. In the third act, apparently, the scene would have leaped ahead to Hollywood in the thirties, with an eternal Audubon transferring his attentions from the white egret to the platinum blonde. Balanchine's Audubon might have fixed forever one image of Audubon, that of the emigre classicist, lost in America.

It also makes sense, though, that in the end Balanchine decided to leave the Audubon ballet alone. Perhaps he recognized that there was nothing much to reinterpret. The constant animation that Audubon imposed on his creations, and that to his contemporaries could look so unnatural, has come to seem at the end of his two volumes as beautifully contrived as ballet, and has the same equanimity. In Audubon's world, as in classical dancing, heightened action of any kind—struggle, escape, seduction, threat, violent death—becomes an opportunity for grace; "And speed, speed, is his only hope for life." Attempting to fix each animal as his imagination grasped it, Audubon ended up painting a catalogue of five hundred and eighty-five aspects of what is still an American theme: that natural life is lived in fear, ruled by habit, and relieved by flight.