In the early 1800s, an individual set out to explore the far reaches of North America with the goal of painting every species of bird that existed.

John James Audubon's objective was as much a pursuit of knowledge as it was an act of creativity.

in the nascent field of ornithology, his was not the first attempt at such an effort, but it would surpass those who preceded him, and inscribed his name among the most celebrated of 19th century Americans in the fields of art and science.

A man would have to have an enormous ego and self-confidence to undertake this enormous Birds of America project that he labored upon so diligently.

He became one of the most traveled people of his own time, venturing into places where no one had ever been before.

Audubon was the kind of person who walked into the room and he had this incredible aura around him.

you know that everybody looked at him He was just -- sparks were coming off of him.

He was just so high energy.

He used his eyes and his gun.

He didn't have a Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide to the Birds.

I think very simply you could say that nobody else Has done it better.

Number one, like Elvis, he goes by one name, right?

Given the time, given the circumstances, what the man achieved is monumental.

You could stack him up against anybody.

Look what the guy did on the frontier.

♪ ♪ By the time he finished, Audubon had traveled from Labrador, Canada, in the north, down to Key West, Florida, the southernmost tip of the continental U.S, and to Scotland, and England, and France, back and forth across seven trips over the Atlantic Ocean.

The fruit of this effort was the publication of the four-volume tomb, The Birds of America, and the five-volume Ornithological Biography.

Where The Birds of America showcased his artistry, the Ornithological Biography recorded his observations of avian behavior and physiology.

Both detailed over 400 birds, every species he could capture, draw, paint, document, and describe in exacting detail.

They are priceless, they are a national treasure, that you could not put a value on it just like you could not put a value on Leonardo's Mona Lisa.

And I like to call Audubon America's Leonardo because he has many of the same aspects, the interest in science and art, this ineffable quality, the idea of people becoming so involved with him and so emotional about him, just like they do with Leonardo.

He was really a kind of renaissance man before the Renaissance in America.

He made the great migration of that era across the Appalachians into Kentucky and began a process that one historian has called the creation of Americans.

Today, in many places he traveled, one will find the name Audubon attached to a variety of organizations, places, and businesses.

The most familiar use of his name is with the National Audubon Society.

Formed in the late 19th century, the founders were inspired by the beauty of his art, and dedicated their efforts to the conservation of birds and other wildlife.

However, Audubon and his legacy is complicated for contemporary society.

While among the first to note the impact of humans on wildlife and their habitat, he shot and killed thousand of birds in pursuit of his art.

Even more problematic, Audubon, the son of a French captain who owned a plantation in Haiti, bought and sold slaves.

Audubon relied on their labor, as well as that of indigenous people.

Though he failed to acknowledge their contributions, just as he failed to acknowledge other collaborators over the years.

The Audubon Society, along with its independent chapters, the birding community, and Audubon scholars continue to re-examine the systemic racism and patriarchy embedded in Audubon's past, and to make the activity of birding and wildlife conservation more inclusive.

Audubon arrived in the United States from France during a formative period of the American experience at a time of intense interest by European societies.

The new world was seen as an undeveloped frontier, full of mysteries, an exotic other that contrasted with the more cosmopolitan European society.

Americans were glad to fuel that interest, while at the same time seeking ways to present a culture worthy of respect.

So, if you take a look at any of the architecture that is being built throughout the early 19th century, in particular, along the East Coast, is that they're trying to emulate the classical model and they're trying to emulate the European cities, at the same time that they're trying to prove that Americans are just as capable, just as intelligent, just as artistic as Europeans.

It's why when Jefferson sends a taxidermied moose overseas because he's trying to say, “See, our animals are just as big as your animals.

In fact, they're bigger than your animals, and we're better than you because we have these giant animals."

This was a new world, and there was competition.

People were coming over to North America and South America and different countries in the world and going back to Europe.

And the temptation was always there to be as exotic as you can be in your representation.

You know, you don't -- you people don't have any history, you don't have any monuments, you know, you don't have any great art.

That's another thing.

Let's do some great art, folks.

I mean, hasn't that got to be a reason.

You don't have any monumental anything.

And so Americans were trying to prove that they were Robust, prolific.

Scientific inquiry, as we think of today, took a slow evolution to the disciplined practice of hypothesizing, testing, and codifying.

By Audubon's time however, the Swedish botanist.

Carl Linnaeus had established a widely accepted system of classifying plants and animals.

The practice of documenting the real world was well Underway.

But in the late 19th century, one who studied the natural world by emphasizing personal observation and the use of illustration was referred to as a naturalist rather than a scientist.

And in this, Audubon straddled the two disciplines of the arts and sciences.

Conveying that visual impression is really, really of primary importance.

When you look at his writing, one particularly interesting example to me is the biography of the hummingbird.

It's all about getting close to a bird, seeing the bird, being seen by the bird, getting involved in this kind of exchange of looks.

With Audubon, you have the direct encounter with a bird, very rarely in profile in his mature work, but engaged in some sort of activity.

So the very term illustration doesn't capture what he's doing.

His watercolors and the plates based on them are fields of force, really.

With Audubon, nature isn't a noun, it's really a verb.

There's always something going on in his art.

Birds are mating, they are preying or they're being preyed upon.

The female redheaded woodpeckers eagerly reach for food offered by their males.

A male and female Common Eider stand and fight for territorial possession.

But these depictions upset some in the scientific arena.

On one hand, Audubon the storyteller has been accepted as a brash, colorful personality, but some of his claims came under question and would place tarnish on his reputation that still resonates.

One case was found to be more accurate than originally thought.

An early critic noted that rattlesnakes, for example, could not climb trees.

Only later it was accepted as possible, though rare.

In contrast, his assertion that the Bird of Washington was a new species and larger in size to other eagles drew raised eyebrows.

Doubt soon rose since no other naturalist ever made such a discovery.

And Audubon didn't have a dead specimen to back his claims He was initially accused of misidentifying the bird, but later charged with intentional Exaggeration.

Critics have later alleged Audubon with plagiarism, arguing his bird was knowingly designed from the previous works of others.

His depictions were also criticized for the emotional and dramatic qualities that he instilled, being guilty.

of anthropomorphism.

That is imbuing his birds with human-like qualities.

And he has been criticized for and being anthropomorphic, and he actually really isn't because if you observe the animal world and the avian world they do have, depending on the species, they exhibit the qualities that Audubon show.

For example, the Eskimo curlew, which is now 99.99% extinct, he has the male bird looking at the female bird who is clearly deceased in the foreground.

And it's a very bleak landscape because it's a Labrador scene.

And she has her wing exposed.

And people have said, “Oh, that's because the species has unique coloration on the inside of their wings.” But the bird is looking quizzically with his head cocked.

And it's really very, very common, birds that mate for the season or for life, when a mate dies, they will continue looking at that bird until they are convinced that it is deceased.

We are the ones who are putting the anthropomorphism into Audubon's pictures.

He is recording avian behavior.

As so many were in the early years of the Republic Audubon was an immigrant.

His interest in nature began while growing up during the turmoil and violence of the French Revolution, in the town of Nantes, in the late 1700s, under the caring eyes of his father and stepmother.

It was during this early period, he showed promise as an artist and a love of birds.

Audubon became rather obsessed with birds, and spent a lot of time beginning to try to figure out.

He didn't at first try to draw them.

He wanted to bring them back to life, which I found psychologically very telling.

And he says, “I carried this problem to my father he introduced me to a book of illustrations of birds, and I saw that I could draw them as if alive.” So Audubon had to kill the birds.

But in doing so, his point was, paradoxically, to try to draw them and bring them back to life.

Now, where would that have come from, except all the death that he saw as a boy traumatized in all the slaughter in Nantes, when he went through the terror?

His father sent him, in 1803, to Mill Grove for several reasons, probably one, to escape conscription By Napoleon, he didn't want him to be drafted.

And also to try to give him a life cause, to teach him some practical things of running that particular farm Or estate, a beautiful estate on Perkiomen Creek.

Well, for Audubon, it was an amazing thing because it gave him access to America's birds and wildlife.

So, Audubon came here prepared to have to reinvent himself.

And living in America, picking up the immigrant dream of renewing oneself here, he envisioned himself as a pioneer, a frontiersman.

But travel during the early days in North America was an arduous experience, full of danger and uncertainty.

The pursuit of birds for illustration was dictated by where they could be found.

And that took Audubon in the most remote environments.

I think that we often don't pay all that close attention to the psyche that we would have to undertake this sort of trip.

You don't know if there's going to be anything at the end.

You don't know if there's going to be food.

You don't know if there's going to be shelter.

There had to be a constant sense of, “Am I going to find anything?

Is it going to be worthwhile for my backers, for my supporters?

Will I lose all of my drawings from rot or rats, or just the general disease of this trip?

And will I survive?” With his early illustrations, young Audubon's approach to natural art continued to evolve, not so much as a vocation, but rather as an avocation.

What is so amazing that we see in the works that Audubon did already, in 1803 or 1805, at Mill Grove, Is that he was already drawing, at that point, bird's life size.

If you measure the bird that he painted, and it was 47 millimeters, you measure his painting, it's 47 millimeters, and that's how he did it.

So, we know exactly how big these birds are.

We know exactly how many feathers they had on their -- in their tails.

We know how many eyelashes they had.

We know what color their eyes were at different ages because if he found differences, he always put them in there.

Audubon used the largest format of paper available, called, the double elephant folio, over 3x2 feet in size.

But even so, for the largest birds, he still had to compromise in order to fit them on the page.

He was criticized for depicting birds in unnatural positions.

But this was not necessarily the case.

One of the things I would caution anybody that's gonna give that criticism to Audubon is I would strongly encourage them to look at some of the modern photography that's possible these days, and how they're catching birds, because I routinely, when we work with looking at images taken by really good photographers, actually think to myself that, “Wow, there's a position that I would never have guessed a bird would be able to put itself in.” And it's something like Audubon actually [laughs] did in some plate.

But getting the size, the details, and posture of a bird was not a simple task, and would take some time in the making.

Audubon, the perfectionist, did not allow himself to so easily accept his own work.

Every year or so, he would have accumulated 100 or 200 drawings.

He would systematically go through them and destroy all the ones that weren't any good, which would typically be most of them in the early years, so that he would, in a sense, force himself to have to start over.

We see in his earliest efforts, stiff and lifeless forms, just the style he so much rejected by those who preceded him.

Two British naturalists, Mark Catesby and Alexander Wilson avoided the realism and artistic interpretation that Audubon sought.

Consequently, their work documenting birds were considered scientific illustrations.

while Audubon's more as art.

That's where Audubon began to cross the line, is that his predecessors, Wilson and Catesby, and so on and so forth, had been illustrating to show a scientific reality, okay?

Not to show the bird and how it enacted in its habitat.

Almost to give it a story was part of what Audubon's paintings did.

And that's where it pushes the line in going from illustration to art.

In the beginning, Audubon struggled to find the right technique in bringing his birds to life.

He tried drawing them alive in their natural habitat, but they were too elusive.

In a letter he wrote to a friend, Audubon noted that he never drew from a stuffed specimen.

He felt that animals displayed in museums were often poorly constructed, that the person mounting them, he said, “Possessed no further talents than that of filling the skins until plumply formed.” He adopted an approach that involved shooting as many birds as needed to get the right specimen for careful study And in his lifetime, he killed, literally, a countless number of birds in pursuit of his art.

But when hanging a carcass from a string didn't work, he tried propping them up with a cork and wires, one effort he described as grotesque.

And he wrote, “I gave it a kick, demolished it to atoms, and walked off, and thought again.” Artist, Robert Stagg demonstrates the use of a grid system and how Audubon achieved the accuracy in his drawings.

Here, Stagg carefully pins a tufted titmouse in a natural pose that Audubon might have made.

Once mounted, the drawing begins.

I can start from a position, say, about here, and the wings curve outward.

And then back down across the line.

at about a third over, I can measure back down one, two units crossing just about like this.

and like this, the tufted titmouse has a little peak, and that's what I'm trying to establish right now, where that is.

Famous quote by Michelangelo warning artists to keep the compass in the eye, not the hand, meaning don't be too mechanical.

[laughs] That ultimately, what you have to do is trust your judgment.

Audubon developed his artistic style utilizing a variety of techniques and materials.

He was never comfortable working with oils nor was it a practical medium to use while traveling the frontier.

Watercolors were common for Ornithological art, and Audubon used them.

But he wanted something more.

He discusses about how ornithological illustrators were very dry and they use watercolor.

They had the translucent water colors over them, over these hard lines that an etching will give.

He didn't like that.

He wanted to use something that had texture.

I've laid in an undercoat of watercolor, and I'm gonna layer on top of that some pastel, which is a technique that Audubon followed.

It allowed him to work rapidly and capture what he believed were the fading colors of the bird after death.

This layering of media created, for Audubon, I think a much more realistic depiction of the bird, and brought it back to life.

It creates a kind of textural effect when completed that could never be duplicated by the printers, no matter how experienced.

And I think Audubon certainly recognized that, but for him it was necessary to create that to revivify the bird.

Something that Audubon made use of very often was a very thin pencil line used on top of either watercolor or pastel to indicate the striations in the feathers so that they would follow the direction, just hundreds of lines, thousands on each bird that would give it something of the texture of individual feathers.

After three years, Audubon gave up managing the Mill Grove farm.

He moved to Louisville, Kentucky, a bustling frontier town along the Ohio River, and opened a mercantile store.

The following year, he married Lucy Bakewell who he knew from Mill Grove.

And the two settled in Kentucky to raise a family.

In the years to come, Lucy would provide her husband much needed support to undertake the long arduous travels in assembling The Birds of America.

For now, Audubon kept up a painting regimen, although he still had no real plans for anything greater than his own satisfaction.

Not long afterward, by chance, a fortunate meeting took place that would give the artist a clearer perspective on his own work.

The Scottish naturalist, Alexander Wilson, later regarded as the Father of American Ornithology, was himself carefully documenting birds of North America.

His work was considered the most advanced for the time, but whose efforts, in a few short years, would be overshadowed by Audubon.

Wilson, coming into the store that he was part of and trying to sell him his work.

And Audubon looked at Wilson's paintings and realized that they were rather primitive compared with his, and that his own were much better.

And his partner said to him, “Don't you buy these Because yours are much better.” So, according to Audubon, he didn't buy the Wilson set But I think there can be no doubt that this meeting stimulated Audubon to realize that there was a potential in publishing his own works, and that he that must have been a stimulus to Audubon to get on with it, and to try and complete his task.

Soon after, Audubon and Lucy, with baby in tow, moved down river to Henderson, Kentucky.

There they lived a comfortable life until an economic downturn, along with poor business ventures, placed him in debtors' prison back in Louisville.

When he and Lucy lost much of their belongings to settle their legal entanglements, Audubon turned to his creative talents to support his growing family, which now included two sons.

That's when he realized that he might make a living as an artist, when he began doing black chalk portraits of people.

And they were selling like hot cakes because there were no cameras in 1819 and 1820.

The only way you could get an image of someone in your family, and he often drew people who were dying, and sometimes even people who were recently dead.

There's one story where a family actually exhumed the body of a little three-year-old girl who had died, and laid her on a table so that Audubon could draw her, as he said, “As if still alive.” I think one of the most interesting parts about Audubon is that if he had not failed in his early adventures we would have never known him as the great artist that he is today.

He may not have had the opportunity to explore that Part of himself.

After 13 years in Kentucky, Audubon accepted a position with the newly formed Western Museum, upstream in Cincinnati, while continuing to draw.

But the poor economy caught up with them there as well.

Now, he and Lucy made the fateful decision, they would turn their sights full-time toward creating The Birds of America.

And, in turn, expanding the scope of ornithology as it existed at that time.

♪ ♪ Eventually, there was a need to expand beyond the Ohio Valley to pursue new species.

So, in 1820, less than a year after moving to Cincinnati, Audubon said goodbye to his family and at age 35, hitched a ride on a flatboat on a southern course down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to Louisiana, to embrace a new ambitious venture.

One the family would devote the full of their lives.

And work began right away, shooting, drawing, painting, dissecting, and documenting birds as the boat floated its slow three-month journey.

Settling down with little money, his portraiture, art, and tutoring, along with Lucy's later work as a governess, would be their only support.

Audubon thought that he could get work here.

He could get some commissions to paint portraits of wealthy benefactors.

And he could use this money to fund his real ambition, which was to create The Birds of America.

Joining him was Joseph Mason, a talented young art student who was the first of among important collaborators, creating the backgrounds and settings for Audubon's birds.

That would free Audubon to create those complex compositions without having to spend the time doing both the plants and the birds.

Certainly they had to coordinate their efforts to create complex compositions that intertwined plants and bird overlapping.

Of all of Audubon's efforts up to this point, only about a dozen paintings would find their way into publication.

In his pursuit of perfection, he destroyed hundreds of drawings over the years until he found the right sense of realism.

It was here, in Louisiana, that his art of the avian world took full flight.

And the sheer abundance of wildlife here really opened up his art for him.

It was really a window for him It was a window into the wider world of nature.

The four years Audubon lived in Louisiana were among his most challenging financially, but they were also his most prolific and creative period, creating over 100 watercolor drawings that would eventually be included in The Birds of America.

Once enough drawings were created and their finances depleted, the Audubons went looking for a publisher.

Specialized skill was required to reproduce the intricacies of his work.

And like the paintings themselves, the published versions would be in the large life-size double elephant folio format.

The practice of transferring an image to paper has evolved through a variety of techniques since woodblock printing in the 1st century.

By the 1800s, the state-of-the-art, called etching, involved a multi-layered process of tracing a copy of the original, transferring that drawing to a heavy copper plate, engraving that image by hand, etching it into the metal with acid, and finally applying ink to the plate for printing.

Art Professor Michael Aakhus recreates the process Audubon's engravers, William Lizars and Robert Havell, used during that period.

As I begin to go, I'll be looking at all of the very fine detail, and I'll be laying those out in lines and drawing to try to reproduce as much as possible the qualities of the original that are in the plate, and laying out all those wonderful little lines that Havell had placed to reproduce the qualities of the feather.

And in the original drawings, we would have had Audubon laying out much of the details of the feathers.

We are looking for a line, you're looking for variations in light and dark.

So that I'll be basically trying to follow as closely as possible the material that is coming through the tissue paper that I can see, and then laying in those values that are visible to the eye.

Once traced, a copper plate is prepared by smoothing down the edges before applying a protective coating to the surface.

We use some asphaltum, which is a ground which is asphalt basically, but a very highly refined version of that, and then thinned way down so that we can put on a very thin layer of this over the entire surface of the plate.

Next, the trace drawing is transferred to the coated surface using a high-pressure roller press.

In Audubon's time, the press was manually operated by a flywheel, but today one has the benefit of an electric motor.

The image must now be etched into the plate itself.

The process of manually scratching into a copper plate is a tedious one, requiring concentration and patience to accurately reproduce the detail in the drawing.

Once finished, the plate is then submerged in an acid bath, where only the exposed copper is etched.

We have our copper plate, which we have now put our engraving on it and scratched through that asphaltum ground, and begin to etch away the copper that's exposed in these lines where we've got our scratches.

So, that will allow us to actually put into the plate these lines in a much deeper way than it would be just by doing the light scratching.

And we'll begin to get some bubbles that will appear on the surface of that, right on the lines.

And then you can see that we're getting some action We're getting some good action on this plate.

And there, you can see bubbles forming right there, particularly in this area right here, and then coming up to the surface.

Then it can take -- the speed that this is etching, anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes in the solution should give us a good bite on this plate.

Once the plate is cleaned, the actual printing can take place.

That final process is demonstrated with one of Audubon's original copper plates.

The museum at the Audubon State Park, in Henderson, Kentucky, has in its collection two of Havell's rare plates.

And for the first time in 150 years, prints were made at the University of Southern Indiana, across the Ohio River, in nearby Evansville.

It was questionable whether the printing expertise for such a large project existed in the U.S. or whether it would be necessary to look overseas, In England.

When the Audubons sought a publisher, they first looked at the work being done in Philadelphia, then the country's intellectual center and home of the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Support for his efforts and acceptance before the scientific community were mixed.

A number of naturalists were impressed with his work and nominated him for membership into the academy.

But his brash personality and overconfidence ran into a political wall with the academy vice president, George Ord, involving a shared acquaintance, Alexander Wilson.

George Ord, who really stands in the way of Audubon getting accepted to the Philadelphia Academy of sciences and of being accepted as an expert On birds, he has both economic and personal motivations to keep Audubon's work from appearing.

He'd been a great friend of Alexander Wilson, the author, and artist of American Ornithology.

Ord produces a little biographical sketch in which he refers to Wilson as the Father of American ornithology.

And he talks about how we were blessed by Almighty Providence, and that He sent this great Father of American ornithology to this place at this time so that his genius could be realized.

I mean, when you're talking about that kind of praise, you can see the personal animosity that he might have towards Audubon because apparently Audubon didn't make any secret of the fact that he thought Wilson was wrong about some of his birds.

When Audubon came to Philadelphia, in 1824, Ord was already looking at publishing a new edition of American Ornithology.

And if Audubon came out with a new book that had 200 more birds in it, that would pretty much undercut the demand for Wilson's republication.

We think of publication history, and particularly when it comes to Audubon's Birds of America, well, of course, people would have wanted to publish it because it was destined to become a classic.

It certainly didn't make it into print in America because of personal and financial concerns of the man who was publishing a rival book.

And I just think that kind of detail about the publishing history of such a now well-known book, It's just utterly fascinating.

Leaving Philadelphia empty-handed, Audubon traveled to the northeast, before returning to Louisiana, still without the support he sought.

Now, he and Lucy worked the following year for a one-way ticket to England.

In May of 1826, with his drawings, supplies and important letters of introduction in hand, Audubon boarded a ship for an oceanic trip to the unknown.

The two-month voyage landed him in the port city of Liverpool, and a very different reception from what he received in Philadelphia.

He and his art were immediately embraced.

A guy named Natty Bumppo, a hero of James Fenimore Cooper's book that had reached Europe, and people were fascinated with the American frontier.

Just about precisely when that happened, Audubon arrives He's wearing buckskins, his hair is halfway down his back.

He goes to these meetings of scientists, and he does owl hoots and Indian hoots.

And he has these magnificent paintings of the birds of America.

He can tell you stories that would curl your hair a lot of them embellished, I'm sure.

That was it, the country, England and Europe too, France was ready for that.

He had enormous appeal as an individual.

He had his long-flowing hair, his very handsome looks.

And he wore the clothing of an American woodsman.

And it must have attracted and appealed to the people of all these cities, and marked him as a person of particular interest.

Before proceeding on to London to find a publisher, Audubon decided to venture north to Edinburgh, Scotland.

And when he came, he found Edinburgh, in what was known at that period as the Scottish Enlightenment or the Golden Age.

Edinburgh was a ferment of intellectual activity.

Philosophers, like Hume, economists, like Smith, were attracting a great deal of attention.

The medical school at that time was perhaps the best in the world.

And a lot of American students were coming over to study in Edinburgh.

And Audubon was caught up in this.

And when he arrived, he just loved the city.

He was immediately attracted to it.

And he liked the people he met and the hospitality he received.

A chance encounter with natural historian, Patrick.

Neill, who was likewise impressed with what he saw, gave Audubon a reason to remain in Edinburgh.

He was delighted to meet Audubon, very impressed by his paintings, and introduced him to William Home Lizars, who happened to be living just around the corner from Audubon's lodgings in 2 George Street.

In Edinburgh.

And that Lizars, when he came to see Audubon's paintings, was immediately taken by them.

And he saw Audubon's paintings and realized that they were way ahead of two other bird books that he was having to be engraving the illustrations for at that time.

And these two men, both very influential and popular figures in Edinburgh.

And Neill and Lizars opened the doors for Audubon, and he was introduced to other people, and the people flocked to see his paintings in his lodgings.

And he certainly sought out the approval of other acientists, and he sought membership, in scientific organizations.

And after becoming a member of various organizations, he used that abbreviation together with his name, displaying it proudly.

So, he was accepted into the scientific community The abbreviations would alternate among the various publications, representing his acceptance in the Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Linnean Society, and the Royal Society of London He never really, I think, sought that sort of acceptance within the artistic community.

And his exhibitions were always connected with the promotion of his contribution to science.

The Birds of America he saw is the most complete.

With printing underway, Audubon, a master of self-promotion, began selling his works in subscription form.

Although a common approach used at that time, his was unique.

He departed from other ornithological illustrators in terms of how he instructed Havell to organize The Birds of America.

He decided he was going to organize them, not by taxonomy, but rather as he said, according to nature.

And, of course, according to nature was surprise, because it would be very dull and very boring if you were a subscriber and opened your five prints that you would receive every six weeks to two months, and you had 60 seagulls.

Just think how many months you'd have of seagulls 40 sparrows, just how many months of sparrows, no one would open the boxes.

But then he would do something amazing.

He had one large bird, the full-size of the double elephant folio, one medium bird, and three small.

Many times they were songbirds.

So again, you had a mixture of everything.

Sometimes you were in the swamp, sometimes you were in the trees, but you would have a mixture of things.

So you always were kept on your feet so that it would be like nature.

It would be a surprise.

It would always be a new unfolding story.

Using this sales strategy, Audubon generated a brisk business during his trip north.

Once he ran out of potential subscribers, he traveled south for new prospects, eventually landing in London.

While there, his collaboration with Lizars, In Edinburgh, unexpectedly became short-lived with just a few plates created.

After Lizars had completed 10 of Audubon's engravings, he said that his colorists had gone on strike, and he couldn't continue.

And I suspect that there was a financial element into Audubon had no money at all.

He wasn't able to pay upfront or even to pay for the production of his engravings as they were done.

He, quite by accident, meets Robert Havell.

And Havell happens to be, at that particular time, the world's greatest engraver.

And so, this is an enormous step.

Had it not been for that, we may not be sitting here right now, because Audubon would have failed.

Havell really intuitively recognized the importance of this work.

And in some cases, knew better than Audubon, really, what was good for a plate.

Havell Jr. contributed a unique visual element to Audubon's birds, involving a technique called aquatinting, a complex process that adds shading and three-dimensional form to the lines that are already etched.

Aquatinting starts when a printmaker carefully sprinkles powdered rosin that melts on to the heated plate.

The plate is then submerged in acid to etch subtle areas that will hold the ink.

Once one etching takes place, a ground is applied over that area to protect it.

Then more Rosin is used to create darker areas, and the process is repeated.

Here, a print from a Havell plate shows the various stages of aquatinting, creating different levels of shading, in contrast to a Lizars print where shading is created only by the engraved lines and the applied painting.

And you can see when they first started out, it was a much more mechanical collaboration, but they became so much of a partnership that it was almost second nature.

It was like almost a beast with two heads that they thought alike.

In the magnificent frigatebird, which Darwin, of course, loved, and Darwin and had heard Audubon's first lecture in Edinburgh.

In the watercolor, which is an incredible work, because he shows iridescence, here, with a combination of watercolor and wash, it's not a blackbird, but it has purples, and turquoise, and greens, and then over that 10,000 strokes of graphite for every barb of every feather.

But its feet, he shows and he remarks, foot above and foot beneath, one is yellow and one is pink.

And then he tells Havell not to put them on the lower-right, where they are in the watercolor, but he tells them to put them up above, and he tells them to turn the bird slightly so that its dart-like swooping motion is in a different position in the print so, you see the presence of him in many, many of these plates in -- some in significant ways, sometimes in less significant ways, And you see Audubon trusting him, beginning to trust him, sometimes only sketching an outline of something.

When you think of the plate of the roseate spoonbill, for example, he just indicates with a few, kind of, strokes of the pencil, how that landscape is supposed to look like, this kind of watery landscape that we see behind this extraordinary bird.

And Havell just goes ahead and finishes it.

Sometimes he just contributes gorgeous landscapes In the plate of the barn owls, for instance, the nightscape of a river, of a curving, winding river is entirely Havell's contribution.

The one of the crucial things about Birds of America is that the birds are the residents of these landscape Humanity is reduced to insignificance.

There are little huts and cabins in some plates or fence posts or something like that, but humanity is secondary And Havell enforced that sense.

By the time Audubon reached London, he had secured close to 100 subscriptions, but there were challenges ahead.

The printing by Havell needed constant oversight.

The written text for the Ornithological Biography had yet to begin.

More subscriptions needed to be sold.

And although a quarter of his birds had been completed, many more needed to be captured, drawn, and painted.

So, in 1829, after three years overseas, Audubon set sail back to the United States.

He would be reunited with Lucy and his two sons, in Louisiana, while capturing more birds and promoting his work.

By this time, John James Audubon had reached a prominent level of respect and recognition in scientific and social circles, both in the U.S. and abroad.

While visiting the Academy of Sciences, in Paris, the previous year, his work was lauded as the greatest monument yet erected by art to nature.

In the U.S., The American Journal of Science and Art said the first set of birds completed were, “The most magnificent work of its kind ever executed in any Country.” And during this time, Audubon dined with President Andrew Jackson in the White House.

But the visit to the States was temporary.

Lucy joined him as they sailed back to Europe to continue the work, and to begin the Ornithological Biography.

For that project, Audubon needed a writer with a deeper scientific background.

He found that person, fellow naturalist William MacGillivray, back in Edinburgh.

MacGillivray would handle the more formal scientific profiles, while Audubon emphasized his observations in the field.

Audubon's contribution to ornithology, most of his bird essays start with an incident, “This is how I found the bird.

This is a personal encounter I had with a bird.

This is what I did.

This is how I caught it or this is how it evaded me.” The next step for him is to describe how they look or certain peculiarities of behavior which often involves comments on nests or how they raise their young or courtship.

He talked about them in purely -- in almost purely human terms.

He talked about the purple martin as being courageous, and having a sense of its own rights.

And he talked about the house wren as being little, and plucky, and courageous, or the blue jays as being rogues, and thieves, and treacherous, and dastardly.

By 1831, the first of the five volumes of the Ornithological Biography was finished.

And once again, Audubon and Lucy returned to the U.S.

In the next seven years, they would sail four more times between the two worlds.

Audubon would explore north, south, east and west to complete his collection for subscribers.

Along with Joseph Mason, he collaborated with six other artists to create the varied backgrounds.

Robert Havell would contribute, along with George Lehman, John Bachman, Maria Martin, and his sons, John Woodhouse and Victor, all with their own unique style, providing the varied backgrounds and settings.

By 1838, all four volumes of The Birds of America were finished, some 18 years after Audubon had left Cincinnati, Ohio, to devote full-time to the project.

Soon after, a smaller version was started, the Royal Octavo Edition, something more practical in size and affordable to a wider audience.

The Birds of America made good money for the Audubons.

They built their final home, a three story residence along the Hudson River, on Manhattan Island, and, for a short time, lived a comfortable life.

A year after moving in, however, at age 58, Audubon was on the move again, this time up the Missouri River to document mammals for a collection he called, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America.

♪ ♪ But as the years passed, his eyesight and overall health declined.

His sons would finish this last work.

In 1851, suffering from a stroke and dementia, Audubon passed away at age 65.

Within 10 years, both sons, Victor and John Woodhouse died, leaving Lucy.

to support herself and the estate.

With financial resources depleted, she sold Audubon's original paintings to the New York Historical Society, where they are periodically placed on display.

The copper plates, she could not sell, and many were sold as scrap.

All of about 80 survived today.

Audubon advanced the science of ornithology while raising the quality of aviary art to a new level.

He doubled the known bird species in comparison to his contemporary, Alexander Wilson.

His paintings, drawn from nature, were an integral part of his science, an innovation for the time.

His was a new spirit of inquiry.

The detail that Audubon brought to his birds are found in the works of aviary artists today.

He would likely be pleased with the attention to realism, but he might miss the drama.

The popularity of his prints exemplify the matchlessness of his art.

For many years, Audubon's birds were worth more individually to collectors than as a full set, but no more.

Until 2013, the complete four-volume The Birds of America held the highest single price paid in auction for a publication at $11.5 million.

The complete sets that survive today, estimated at 120 in existence, will likely never be separated.

Even today, nearly two centuries after Audubon's death.

The Birds of America continue to loom in the national imagination as the Sistine Chapel of American ornithology.

It's the sheer abundance and variety of these paintings that really draws us to look closer.

And to think that these paintings, as richly varied as they are, only indicate a fraction of the abundance that's in the landscape of Audubon's time, and it continues to be in our landscape today, is really an invitation for us.

It's an invitation to wonder, and it's an invitation to awe, and it's an invitation to preserve the enormous abundance that we continue to have ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ For more information on this program, Visit usi.edu/audubon.