Others insist that Audubon’s mother was white. He stole human remains and sent the skulls to a colleague who used them to assert that whites were superior to non-whites.Ĭomplicating this history is his ambiguous background: Some researchers have credibly argued that Audubon was born to a woman of mixed race, which would mean that the most famous American bird artist was a man of color. But far worse, he enslaved Black people and wrote critically about emancipation. He was contemporaneously and posthumously accused of-and most certainly committed-both academic fraud and plagiarism. His contributions to ornithology, art, and culture are enormous, but he was a complex and troubling character who did despicable things even by the standards of his day. It’s fair to describe John James Audubon as a genius, a pioneer, a fabulist, and a man whose actions reflected a dominant white view of the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
His seminal The Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size prints, quickly eclipsed Wilson’s work and is still a standard against which 20th and 21st century bird artists, such as Roger Tory Peterson and David Sibley, are measured. John James Audubon (1785-1851) was not the first person to attempt to paint and describe all the birds of America (Alexander Wilson has that distinction), but for half a century he was the young country’s dominant wildlife artist.
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