John James Audubon

John James (or Jean-Jacques ) Audubon , born with Santo Domingo the April 26th 1785 and died in New York the January 27th 1851, is a ornithologist, naturalist and American painter of French origin , naturalized in 1812, considered as the first ornithologist of the Nouveau World.

Biography

Audubon was born in Haiti, wire illegitimate of an immigrant Frenchwoman and a captain to the long course of origin Breton and Protesting E, which had in the island of the plantations and the slaves. It is impassioned very young person for the Natural history. It is high in France, with Nantes and Couëron, by his mother-in-law. He claimed to have received lessons of the painter David but, like much of other “stories” of Aubudon, this assertion is unfounded.

In 1803, his/her father obtains a false passport to him which enables him to go to the United States and to thus escape the conscription in force in this period of war Napoleonean. During the voyage, it contracts the Yellow fever. The captain of the boat then unloads it in a pension directed by women Quakers who look after it, cure it, and teach particular English of the Quakers to him.

He becomes foreman in a farm close to Philadelphia and starts to study the natural history while directing the first operation of bush setting of the continent. He ties an fly in the ointment of a moucherolle ( Sayornis phoebe ) and notices thus that these birds return to nest each year at the same places. He also starts to draw and paint birds.

After several years of business successes in Pennsylvania and in the Kentucky, it goes bankrupt, which encourages it to continue with more heat its study of the nature and its practice of painting. It descends the the Mississippi with its rifle, its box of paints and its assistant, in the intention to find and paint all the species of birds of North America. It carries out starting from 1810 a wandering life of hunter, while observing nature with love and while describing and by illustrating the flora and of fauna, in particular the birds, with great talent. To draw or paint the birds, it must initially cut down them with small shot not to shred them. It uses then wire to maintain them and return a natural position to them. Its birds are represented in an alive way in their natural habitat. This provision contrasts with the empesées representations of its contemporaries such as Alexander Wilson. Written Audubon: “I say that there are few birds when I cut down some less than one hundred per day. ” One of its biographers, Duff Binder-Davis, observes: “More the bird was rare, more it continued it passionately, apparently without never worrying owing to the fact that to kill the specimen could precipitate the extinction of its species. ”

Not having other incomes, it improves the ordinary one by selling portraits with the order, while his wife, Lucy, work like préceptrice in the families of rich person growers. He seeks an editor for his drawings of birds with Philadelphia, but without success, undoubtedly partly because he had attracted himself the enmity of the scientific celebrities of the city, members of the Academy off Natural Sciences.

Lastly, in 1826 it unloads with London with its portfolio. The British do not weary images of America wild and full with forests. Its success is immediate. He is celebrated like “the man of American wood” and money harvest sufficient to publish the Birds of America between 1830 and 1839. Its work, remarkable by the exactitude of the details and the beauty of the execution, is composed of four volumes containing 435 boards life size painted with the hand. The king George IV account among her enthusiastic admirors. Audubon is elected member of the Royal Society, thus following Benjamin Franklin which was the first American member. Whereas it is with Edinburgh in the search of subscriptions for its book, it makes a demonstration in its manner of using wire to deploy the birds in front of Wernerian Natural History Association of the professor Robert Jameson. A student named Charles Darwin belongs to the public. He also visits the room of dissection of the anatomist Robert Knox, little before the association of Knox with Burke and Hare. He associates with his Oiseaux of America the ornithological Biographies (Edinburgh, 1831 - 1839, 5 volumes in-8), which contain the description of the life of each species represented. This work is written in collaboration with the Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray.

Audubon continues its forwardings in North America and buys a property on the Hudson, today Audubon Park. In 1842, it publishes in the United States a popular edition of the Oiseaux of America . Of return in its fatherland, he undertakes, with the assistance of the doctor John Bachman (1790-1874), the description of the Mammifère S, the viviparous Quadrupèdes of North America , which appears with New York in 1850. The book is completed by its sons and its son-in-law.

John James Audubon is undoubtedly buried with the cemetery of Trinity Churchyard, the crossing of the 155e Rue and of Broadway, in the district of Harlem to New York, where an imposing monument set up in its honor is. Massachusetts Audubon Society, the first among the many learned societies Audubon, was founded and named in its honor in 1896. Several communes and a county in the Iowa also bear its name.

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