Richard Rhodes is the award-winning author of numerous works of nonfiction, fiction, and biography, including John James Audubon: The Making of an American, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Scott V. Edwards is Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. Leslie A. Morris is Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Audubon: Early Drawings is a record of nature and of Audubon’s own
artistic apprenticeship—we can watch Audubon becoming Audubon. The
earliest drawings—done in watercolor and, later, pastel—are simple
profiles of birds silhouetted against the blank page with little in
the way of natural context. They are delicate, hesitant, almost
childlike renderings. Later drawings—made after Audubon had
invented his celebrated technique of pinning dead birds into
naturalistic poses—are more lifelike and animated, more confidently
rendered. These look toward the fully realized images of The Birds
of America, with their intense drama and implied narratives. Even
at an early stage this self-taught artist possessed a powerful
sense of color and a keen sensitivity to the way light can model a
form. Yet we see him reaching the limits of his technique in his
almost-but-not-quite depiction of the male wood grouse’s variegated
plumage. Mastery would come later. Each rendering in Audubon: Early
Drawings gets both a full-page reproduction and a facing-page
commentary. About a bird known as the Willet, shown with a worm
squirming in its beak, we read: ‘The May date of this drawing tells
us that Audubon crossed paths with the Willet during the spring
migration between its wintering grounds on the Gulf Coast of Mexico
and the Caribbean and its breeding areas in wetlands of the
interior West.’ We are right there with Audubon, his traveling bird
and the unlucky worm.
*Wall Street Journal*
Before [Birds of America] made him famous, [Audubon] had spent
decades trying to find a way to make his birds appear to fly off
the page. This collection of 116 early drawings, published together
for the first time, shows that while his early birds didn’t quite
take off, they did have a delicacy and charm that somehow went
missing from his later masterworks.
*New Scientist*
One of the great pleasures of Audubon: Early Drawings, with its
lavish reproductions and scientific notes, is that it allows us to
see the naturalist turning into the artist, laboring not merely to
give his birds scientific accuracy but an almost uncanny life
force.
*New York Times Book Review*
This is the first book to collect and reproduce the pastel, ink,
and watercolor studies from early in [Audubon’s] career—it’s not
hard to glean the first principle that makes his illustrations so
effective: spareness. Although Audubon usually sketches in some
contextual clues—a tree stump, some sand, three or four leaves—his
pages are remarkably blank. What he is really studying is the bird,
so Audubon surrounds the specimen—the osprey, the bullfinch, or the
linnet—in white, letting his notes take care of the habitat,
migration patterns, and the rest. Audubon preemptively limits the
context, isolating and foregrounding the more salient details so we
know at a glance what’s important and what isn’t.
*Boston Globe*
In 1805, Jean-Jacques (later to become John James) Audubon, the son
of a chambermaid who worked on his father’s plantation in
Saint-Domingue, was a refugee in America from revolutionary
violence in Haiti and France, and still many years away from the
celebrity he was later to achieve as a wildlife illustrator. Yet,
as Audubon: Early Drawings clearly demonstrates, he used the next
ten years to lay the foundations for the mastery he was to acquire
in bird illustration. As these drawings, which include European as
well as American species, eloquently show, he had above all
mastered the art of imbuing the dead specimens from which he worked
with a vitality that makes them look for all the world like birds
seen in the wild.
*Literary Review*
These drawings are interesting not just because of their seemingly
naive charm, but also because of their great technical distance
from the work produced in Birds of America. In this collection, the
birds appear in more or less stilted poses, usually in profile.
They appear almost always on an otherwise empty page. Audubon
offers terse notes to describe their habits, a practice he dropped
in Birds.
*New York Times*
These 116 early Audubons from the collections of Harvard University
provide a perspective on the development of the artist’s mature
style. In accordance with established ornithological presentation
of the time, most of the birds are stiffly posed in profile with
little or no background. Some drawings, however, show their
subjects in action or include details of diet or habitat—approaches
Audubon took to portray specimens as ‘drawn from Nature’ in his
monumental The Birds of America. The watercolors and pastels of the
European species were executed in France in 1805 and 1806, and
those of the North American birds date from 1805 to 1821. The
captions discuss when and where Audubon collected the specimens.
Morris, Rhodes, and Edwards contribute essays on the history of the
drawings, the artist’s life, and his science.
*Science*
Drawings [Audubon] made during the period leading up to the
publication of his famous The Birds of America are held by the
Houghton Library and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard
University and are published together here for the first time in
large format and full color. Audubon biographer Richard Rhodes
provides background to their creation. Also included are
transcriptions of Audubon’s annotations to the drawings and
ornithological commentary on Audubon’s depictions of birds found in
Europe and the Eastern United States in the early nineteenth
century, some now rare or extinct.
*Antiques and Fine Art*
Prior to the publication of Birds of America, John James Audubon
spent decades honing his talents. Audubon: Early Drawings sheds
insight into Audubon’s trajectory as an artist and naturalist,
offering 116 bird and mammal images from the fledgling stages of
his career… A wide-eyed belted kingfisher is charming with a
disheveled crown of slate blue plumes. Meanwhile, the composition
of a Carolina parakeet perched among pecan branches is appealing
not only for its organic symmetry but for its value as one of the
few visual records of the now-extinct species—a reminder of
Audubon’s timeless relevance.
*Audubon*
Impressive in its oblong shape and handsomely slip-cased in cloth,
Audubon: Early Drawings represents the first large-format
full-color publication of the Harris Collection [in the Houghton
Library at Harvard University], comprising 116 depictions of
species Audubon collected in the United States and Europe, dating
primarily between 1805 and 1832. Because they are the product of
his own hand, and not the intermediary hands of engravers and
colorists, these drawings convey a wonderful immediacy. Graphite,
ink, and pastels were his preferred mediums—pastels proving early
on more satisfying and more easily manipulated than watercolors.
And by noting the dates of each work we witness the gradual
refinement of his technique: before 1810 the meticulous attention
to details of feathers, feet, and claws seems almost naive against
the relative flatness of his colors. By 1810, however, we see the
emerging hand of the master in such finely delineated and colored
works as the Frog Eater (Redshouldered Hawk) of 1810 and the pair
of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers of 1812.
*The Magazine Antiques*
John James Audubon’s distinctive role in American ornithology,
natural history, and art has long been acknowledged by the numerous
volumes that have been published on his life, career, and
accomplishments. This handsome volume further contributes to an
understanding of the diverse genius and artistic creativity of
Audubon by presenting, in meticulously printed colored plates, 116
of his earliest bird drawings (American and European) from the
collections of the Houghton Library and Museum of Comparative
Zoology at Harvard University. Beginning in 1805 with one of his
earliest drawings, these plates allow readers to examine Audubon’s
evolving style and skills as an ornithological artist. Each plate
is accompanied by the name given the species by Audubon; the
location where the bird was observed, or collected; and the date.
Particularly interesting are the ornithological notes on the
natural history and unique characteristics of the species included
with each plate. These plates are known as the Harris Collection,
and a brief but informative essay provides an introduction to this
Harvard collection.
*Choice*
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