Meadowlark Gallery: The Artist Biographies

John James Audubon (1785-1851)
John James (LaForest) Audubon was born in Les Cayes, Haiti in 1785 and died in New York City in 1851. He became an honorary member of the National Academy in 1833. Audubon was an important bird and quadruped painter. Audubon's father was a ship captain successful as a merchant, planter, and slave dealer in Haiti while his wife remained in France. Audubon's mother was a Creole slave. Brought to France at four, Audubon was legitimatized and educated among the well to do. At the age of fifteen, he was drawing French birds, and at the age of seventeen studied drawing with David in Paris. In 1803, Audubon was sent to Pennsylvania to manage his father's estate, a sportsman in pumps, beginning his ventures into ornithology. From 1807 to 1819, he engaged in a series of failing businesses on the Kentucky frontier. When he was jailed for debt, bankruptcy left him only his clothes, his gun, and his drawings of birds. After a short stay as a taxidermist at the Cincinnati Museum from 1819 to 1820, he set his goals on publishing his bird drawings.

While Mrs. Audubon supported the family, he traveled the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Great Lakes, exploring for birds. Unable to find a publisher in Philadelphia in 1824, Audubon went to Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London from 1826 to 1827 where William Lizars and Robert Havell, Jr. were his engravers. The original drawings of more than one thousand birds were in mixed media, watercolor, pencil, pen, and pastel to accomplish the various effects desired, but when he paid his way with copies of the drawings, the copies were in oil. Audubon returned to the United States in 1831 as its foremost naturalist.

In 1837, Audubon was granted a naval cutter to explore the coastline from New Orleans to Galveston where he spent three weeks. In Houston, he met with General Houston at the time of the celebration of Texas independence, but found no new bird species. In 1843, Audubon went up the Missouri to Fort Union and made an overland trip along the Yellowstone, seeing birds where Catlin had seen Indians. He returned in Indian hunting dress with live deer, badgers, and foxes in addition to his portfolios and collected artifacts. His later years were spent at his Hudson River estate.
View high resolution images of works by John James Audubon when available.