AUDUBON WATERCOLORS MIGRATES TO THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Tuesday, 03 April 2007 05:03

New York City – Audubon’s Aviary: Natural Selection opens at the New-York Historical Society.  Featuring 43 one-of-kind watercolors by the great naturalist John James Audubon (1785-1851), this exhibition offers visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to follow in the artist’s footsteps and experience the creative process that led to his final compositions.  The show is supplemented with recorded birdcalls from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a video underscoring Audubon’s mastery at encapsulating each bird’s personality and unique physical characteristics.  Also featured: a never-before displayed list documenting the ornithological collaboration between Audubon and Charles Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew.  The exhibition will be on display from March 30 through May 20.

Audubon’s Aviary: Natural Selection is the third in a five-part annual Audubon series mounted by the New-York Historical Society.  Each Aviary features different objects drawn from the Society’s permanent Audubon collection, the largest single repository of Auduboniana in the world.  This year’s exhibition showcases groupings of two or three studies of the same species drawn by Audubon.  “Each grouping is an amplification of Audubon’s thinking process, showing what he considered essential in his depiction of the birds and why he selected his final compositions from this pool of compelling candidates,” according to Roberta J.M. Olson, Curator of Drawings and of this exhibition.

For instance, his trio of watercolors of the Great Egret demonstrates Audubon’s struggle over one of his most challenging characterizations.  He wrestled with the problem for more than a decade, painting his first preparatory watercolor in New Orleans in 1821 and the final example, the one engraved for Havell plate 386, probably in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1832.  All three feature males in spring breeding plumage.  “Audubon preferred his third depiction—with the bird in a more animated pose and feeding in its habitat, which underlined his ornithological observations and natural history credentials—to the high aesthetic drama of his first watercolor,” notes Olson.

Only with the New-York Historical Society’s singular collection could this intimate approach to Audubon’s creative process be portrayed.  The works selected for the exhibition cover a thirty-year period, ranging from Audubon’s first depiction of the Orchard Oriole ca. 1808 to his second study of the American Dipper for the last engraving of the project in 1838.  Viewed together, they reveal Audubon’s intellectual and artistic processes, his growing artistic sophistication and the maturation of taxonomic classifications.

“Audubon was a complex man, part artist, naturalist, and adventurer. Born illegitimate in Haiti and raised in Revolutionary France, he came to the United States at the age of eighteen.  A charismatic self-made man, he transformed himself into a buckskin-wearing American legend whose singular passion for representing birds in a life-like fashion has insured his immortality.  His celebration of the wilderness and his later realization of the growing threat to birds and their habitats have made him one of the patron saints of the environmental movement,” comments Olson.

The theory of natural selection, the subtitle of this year’s Aviary, is a cornerstone of modern biology that describes the process by which those members of a species with traits favorable to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce than those with less favorable traits.  The term was introduced by Charles Darwin, the eminent English naturalist, in his 1859 book The Origin of Species based on his study of South American finches and other species during his landmark voyage of study on the HMS Beagle (1831-36).  As a one-time portrait painter who became a field naturalist, Audubon, who was slightly older than Darwin, put a great deal of thought into how to best represent each species by depicting it life-size and with its most characteristic traits.  Audubon published serially and by subscription the work that made his career, The Birds of America from 1827 to 1838. 

The Society also presents, for the first time ever, a list of 425 birds—signed by both Audubon and Napoleon’s nephew Charles Lucian Bonaparte, the Prince of Canino and Musignano.  The two had discussed collaborating on a book about American birds in which Bonaparte would write the text, and Audubon would provide the illustrations.  Both men would have benefited from this proposed partnership.  Bonaparte was a respected ornithologist who had great scientific cachet in taxonomy and pivotal social connections.  Audubon, on the other hand, had made invaluable field observations of newly identified species.  Compiled during a time when avian taxonomy was still evolving, this list represents the state of the art in 1837, the year it was signed.

Other relevant documents, prints, and books exhibited include the Society’s copy of the rare double-elephant folio edition of The Birds of America and two plate proofs (for the Carolina Chickadee, Havell plate no. 160, and Steller’s Eider, Havell plate no. 429), hand-colored by Audubon for use as models by the colorists in Havell’s shop, to ensure chromatic consistency.  They are joined by the three smaller volumes of its text entitled Ornithological Biography, or, an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America… (1831-39), together with Audubon’s draft for the passage about the Merlin (or “Le Petit Caporal”), and four of the 100 fascicles of the smaller octavo edition of The Birds of America (1840-44), three opened to hand-colored lithographs that are reductions and variations of their corresponding original watercolors in the exhibition preparatory for the double-elephant edition.

Concurrently, the Society’s neighbor, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), has organized an exhibition (“The Unknown Audubons: The Mammals of North America”) about Audubon’s second great project, first published in three volumes with hand-colored lithographs as The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845-48).  To link this pair of exhibitions the New-York Historical Society is displaying six selected plates from two different editions of The Quadrupeds, including those of the Common American Wildcat, Musk Ox, Common American Skunk, and Severn River Flying Squirrel in cases on the side of the gallery facing the AMNH.

Visitors can enjoy both exhibitions for the price of admission to just one institution during the run of Audubon’s Aviary: Natural Selection. Present a receipt from one institution to receive a same-day complimentary admission to the other museum from March 31 through May 20, 2007.

ABOUT THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Since 1804, the New-York Historical Society has served as a collective memory of New York, accumulating vast collections.  One of the jewels in the Society’s crown is the cache of 435 watercolors by John James Audubon preparatory for his sumptuous, double-elephant folio print edition of the world-renowned The Birds of America (1827-38).  Audubon’s Aviary: Natural Selection builds on the Society’s mission of exploring American history with an emphasis on New York . As the city’s oldest museum, part of its original mandate was to collect natural history material.  Visit : www.nyhistory.org