Exhibitions

Conservation Status

Audubon painted the Turkey Hen and Chicks, the preparatory watercolor for plate 6, before with his Male Turkey watercolor study for plate 1. Its publication as plate 6  completes his Turkey Family. Heavily hunted since the earliest days of European occupation had destroyed huge swaths of its range by logging and land clearing, Wild Turkey populations reached a nadir in the early 1930s with about 30,000 birds. Already in his lifetime Audubon had noted their declining numbers. Today, after a massive trap-and-transfer effort spanning more than a quarter of a century, about seven million Wild Turkeys strut and gobble around the country. This inspiring wildlife conservation story involved the National Wild Turkey Federation, founded in 1973, which has helped acquire and conserve habitat for the species. While Wild Turkey numbers are stable, biologists in southeastern states, a turkey stronghold, are concerned that populations are tumbling, in some areas shrinking by more than half with the quantity of poults dropping steeply.

John James Audubon

Arguably the greatest American artist-naturalist, John James Audubon (1785–1851) was the legendary rara avis who created The Birds of America (1827–38). Born in the French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti), Audubon was the illegitimate son of Jean Audubon, a naval and merchant marine captain, and Jeanne Rabine, a French chambermaid who died six months after his birth. The cloud of illegitimacy would haunt him throughout his life and perhaps drive his genius. In 1788, during the French Revolution, Audubon’s father sent him to his home in Nantes, where he raised by his stepmother and where his incurable passion for nature was sparked as he began to draw birds. In 1803, his father dispatched him to America to oversee the family’s property at Mill Grove outside of Philadelphia, thus preventing his conscription into Napoleon’s army. Audubon immediately fell in love with America’s wildlife, becoming a champion of his adopted country and a citizen in 1812. A few months after his arrival, he met English-born Lucy Bakewell, who he married in 1808. After trying various professions on the frontier, as well as fieldwork observing and drawing birds along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, the self-taught artist decided to dedicate himself to depicting all the birds of North America. Failing to find an engraver in Philadelphia, Audubon sailed for England in 1826, where in Edinburgh he engaged William Home Lizars to etch the plates for The Birds of America. After ten plates, Lizars’s colorists went on strike, forcing Audubon to seek another engraver. In London Audubon found the printmaker Robert Havell and his son, Robert Havell Jr., who proved to be his ideal collaborator.

The success of The Birds of America is a fascinating story of entrepreneurship and heroic dedication. The work ensured the immortality of Audubon, the self-styled “American Woodsman,” who remained in England until 1839 to finish the task and to complete the Ornithological Biography, the text for The Birds. Returning the US to live in New York City, eventually at Minnie’s Land, he and his sons produced multiple octavo editions of The Birds of America, adding new species, as well as The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845–48). Already by the late 1820s, Audubon was concerned about the disappearance of the American wilderness and some avian species. His appreciation of the natural environment finds expression in the organization named for him, Audubon, formerly the National Audubon Society. Founded in 1905, the national institution succeeded the Audubon Society of New York, which was founded in 1886 by the conservationist George Bird Grinnell, who had been tutored as a youth by Lucy at Minnie’s Land. 

Image: Allen & Horton Photographers, Boston (after a miniature of 1831 by Frederick Cruickshank), Carte-de-visite of Audubon, ca. 1861–62. Photographic reproduction on paper, laid on card. New-York Historical Society Library, Gift of Daniel Parish Jr., 1903