John James Audubon

John James Audubon (April 26, 1785 January 27, 1851) was a French-American ornithologist, naturalist, hunter, and painter. He painted, catalogued, and described the birds of North America in a form far superior to what had gone before. Born in Haiti and raised in France as a youth, in his embrace of America, and his outsize personality and achievem... ents, he represented the new American people of the United States. AUDUBON, John James, naturalist, born near New Orleans, La., 4 May, 1780; died near New York city, 27 Jan., 1851. His grandfather was a fisherman of La Vendee, in France, and his father, who had worked his way up to the command of a French man-of-war, and had acquired a plantation in Louisiana, married there a lady of Spanish descent, named Anne Moynette. When very young, Audubon lived for a short time on a plantation belonging to his father in Santo Domingo, and, after his mother's death in a African American insurrection, was taken to France to be educated. His parents had encouraged in him a love of nature almost before he was able to walk, and he had long amused himself by trying to transfer to paper the graceful forms of the tropical birds with which he was familiar. Although his efforts fell so far short of his ideal that he was accustomed to make a bonfire of them on each birthday, they nevertheless showed talent, and his father placed him in the studio of the celebrated painter David. Here he was set to drawing horses' heads and the limbs of giants, instead of his favorite birds. He persevered, however, in this one study, while he neglected all the others, preferring to spend his time in excursions through the woods, gathering specimens and making drawings of birds. Seeing his tastes, his father, who had designed him for the navy, gave up his plan, and sent the boy, then seventeen years old, to a farm belonging to him at Mill Grove, near Philadelphia. Here young Audubon spent his time in hunting, fishing, drawing, and collecting specimens of natural history. A visit to France, made to lay ...Read More