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Charles Marvin Fairchild (SFS '48) Memorial
Gallery
February 3 · June 4, 2006
Home · Illustrations · Press
In recognition of an important recent acquisition,
the Fairchild Gallery presents Audubon's
Birds of America: Selections from the "Amsterdam Edition", with vivid illustrations by naturalist and artist John
James Audubon (1785 -1851).
In early 2005, the Georgetown University Library received
a generous gift of selections from the so-called "Amsterdam
Edition", a handsome set of a "double elephant
folio" (39 7/16 x 26 5/16 inches) of high-quality
photolithograph reproductions faithful to Audubon's
original illustration sizes. The Amsterdam Edition was
produced between 1971 and 1972 by the Johnson Reprint
Company, of New York (U.S.A.) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands).
Prof. Gary Filerman, Director of the Health Systems Administration
Program at Georgetown University's School of Nursing
and Health Studies, and Melvin Goldfein were the donors
of the Amsterdam Edition, adding a landmark work to the
Library's strong collection of art on paper from
the United States.
The Amsterdam Edition was part of a tradition of reproducing
Audubon's work that began with Audubon
himself, when, in 1840, he and his sons had published
in Philadelphia
an edition on 10 x 6 1/4 inch sheets:
Lithographers used a camera lucida, a device
with lenses that could project a reduced-sized image
onto a surface for copying. From
chromolithographic techniques of the nineteenth
century, to the photomechanical processes in the next
century
(of which the Amsterdam Edition was, at
its time, one of the most sophisticated), to the digital
and electronic
printing of recent decades, publishers
have served an enthusiasm for Audubon's work that has
waned little
since his lifetime. 1
In addition to these selections from the Audubon portfolio,
the exhibition features an important 1840
edition from Philadelphia of The Birds of America, along
with the first volume (1831) of Audubon's Ornithological
Biography; and later Audubon editions that have
been collected by the Georgetown University
Library. To illustrate
the works that preceded and inspired Audubon
(because, in some instances, he thought
that his own work was better),
the exhibition includes volumes of the Histoire naturelle
des oiseaux (1707-1788), compiled by Georges Louis
Leclerc, Comte de Buffon 2; and Alexander
Wilson's 1808-1814 American Ornithology. (Audubon
and Wilson met on one fateful day; "Posterity, encouraged
by the partisan accounts of contemporaries,
has chosen to treat them as rivals," wrote one biographer.
3)
Several works will be shown that reflect the interest
of Audubon's era, before and after his
own life, in recording, cataloguing, and
depicting specimens from
nature, including a color wood engraving
of a magnolia branch from the rare Natural History
of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1743)
by Mark Catesby. About Thomas Nuttall,
the wide-exploring botanist and ornithologist
of whose specimens Audubon copied several,
and whose 1834 Manual of the Ornithology
of the United States and of
Canada is included in this exhibition,
Audubon remarked that he was "a gem...after our own heart."4
Natural scientist James DeKay, who was the editor
of the first paper that Audubon presented,
compiled the mammoth and
well-illustrated Zoological Report of
New York State (from 1842), of which a
volume on ornithology is included
here.
Later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists
Frederick Polydore Nodder, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and
Robert Ridgway, all inspired by Audubon's example,
are represented in the exhibition.
John James (né Jean-Jacques Fougère) Audubon
was born in Haiti and was reared in France. He emigrated
to Pennsylvania at age eighteen. Intrigued by the natural
wonders of North America, and inspired to surpass in
technical proficiency the work of earlier ornithological
illustrators, the self-taught Audubon spent many years
of travel and study, as far west as Yellowstone and from
Labrador to the Gulf Coast of Texas. Unable to find an
engraver and publisher in the U.S. for his drawings and
paintings of birds, he succeeded in having a four-volume
set published in London between 1827 and 1838, to great
acclaim. Subscribers eventually included George IV, and
Canada's Parliament.
Audubon's life and career had been plagued by
a number of misfortunes, such as failed businesses, losses
of his artwork, and, most terribly, losses of children.
A rare 1869 edition of Audubon's first biography,
edited by his widow Lucy, is included here.
In the years after Audubon entered into his publication
agreements in London, and before the publication
of the final folio of Birds of America in 1838,
he returned to the United States on several
occasions to continue
his studies of birds and to produce new
paintings for the engraving series. His
1831-32 trip to Florida
resulted in thirty-one studies, two of
which are included in this exhibition:
the spectacular Brazilian Caracara
Eagle (plate 91), and White-headed eagle
(plate 126) 5. Audubon made a visit to
Washington prior to the Florida
trip - during which he received advice
from President Andrew Jackson - and also
visited the nation's
capital on his tours to find subscribers.
(A portrait of the artist by John Syme
now is in the White House's
collection.)
The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a proliferation
in the pursuit of knowledge, with landmark
achievements in science being among the most important.
In the United
States, concurrent with the exploration
of the North American continent and the growth of cities
and towns
from coast to coast, there was the gradual
establishment of modest schools, colleges, museums, and
other centers
of learning that eventually would constitute
the infrastructure for this increase and preservation
of learning.
In the visual arts, many artists devoted
their efforts
to painstaking study of the natural world.
Celebrity landscape painters such as New
York's Frederic Edwin Church and Albert
Bierstadt traveled throughout
the hemisphere to make accurate studies
of topographical features, vegetation,
animal specimens,
the effects of
light, and other phenomena; and to make
paintings that were admired for what was
presumed to be their fidelity
to realism. Artists such as Audubon should
be considered in the context of this trend.
As Audubon's 1917
biographer Francis Hobart Herrick declared, The Birds
of America was "one of the most remarkable and
interesting undertakings in the history
of literature and science in the nineteenth
century. Unique as it was
in every detail of its workmanship, it
will remain for centuries a shining example
of the triumph of human endeavour
and of the spirit and will of man."6 A recent biographer
quotes an anonymous reviewer of The Birds of America in
the Edinburgh
Literary Journal: "Mr. Audubon
has done much to silence a set of critics
who affect to despise America...Laugh
at the young republic, indeed!
Where is the state of the old world that
can show any results of private and unaided
enterprise to stand in
competition with what has been effected
by three men beyond the Atlantic - Wilson,
Charles Bonaparte, and Audubon? The giant
is awake." 7
Photography, which became an economically practical
tool after Audubon had completed the significant
work that defined his career, did not replace the traditional
means of reproducing two-dimensional images,
but for
many artists augmented it. Audubon's work
is remarkable in part for the vivid, animated character
of many of
his subjects, in a time when direct observation
of live or dead specimens was the only reliable means
for capturing
a naturalistic image. "Audubon was not the first
to try to portray animals in motion, but
his dramatic and vast illustrations of the birds of America
were important
as attempts to show living creatures." 8
Even as Audubon's achievements in art and science
were recognized critically and commercially,
his livelihood faced threats from the very interest in
and advancement
of science that sustained it: As he noted
in 1835, "We
receive no new subscribers in Europe.
The taste is passing for birds like a flitting shadow.
Insects, reptiles and
fishes are now the rage, and these fly,
swim or crawl on pages innumerable in every bookseller's
window." 9
The viewer will note that while prints from the original
edition of The Birds of America commonly are
called "engravings",
in fact they were made by a combination
of etching methods, including the aquatint
etching that facilitated the illusion
of gradations of color. 10
The student of
Audubon's work must be attentive to
the use of nomenclature and spelling in
the descriptions of his paintings. In
a number of cases, the common names that Audubon used
for
particular species
are not those
used today, and some reference works
will employ the current names or spellings,
which can
create
some confusion
when attempting to match a work with
a descriptive entry. (Discrepancies may
be due either to
changes in convention
or, in a number of cases, to identification
errors made by Audubon. 11) For this
exhibition, we are using the names
that Audubon used as they appear on
the reproductions of the original etchings. Indicative of the enduring interest and fascination
in Audubon's contribution to the nation's
cultural and intellectual history, Audubon's
Birds of America: Selections from the "Amsterdam Edition" is
on view at Georgetown University concurrent with Audubon's
Dream Realized: Selections from The Birds of America
at the National Gallery of Art.
1 Robert Brown, "Identifying Audubon bird prints:
originals, states, editions, restrikes,
and facsimiles and reproductions," in Imprint (Autumn
1996). The viewer will note with interest
that six original plates
owned by the American Museum of Natural
History were restored in 1985 and used
to print an edition of 125,
in commemoration of the two-hundredth
anniversary of Audubon's birth (Duff Hart-Davis, Audubon's
Elephant: America's Greatest Naturalist and the
Making of The Birds of America (New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 2004): 273).
2 Some biographers have speculated that
Buffon's work likely would have
been
known in the household of Audubon's French upbringing; see Shirley Streshinsky, Audubon: Life and Art in the American Wilderness (New York: Villard Books, 1993):
15; and John Chancellor, Audubon: A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1978):
32.
3 Chancellor, 58.
4 Streshinksy, 277; see also Chancellor, 201–03.
5 See Kathryn Hall Proby, Audubon in Florida (Coral Gables: University of Miami
Press, 1974).
6 Quoted in Duff Hart-Davis, Audubon's Elephant: America's Greatest
Naturalist and the Making of The Birds of America (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
2004): 271.
7 Hart-Davis, 184. Charles Bonaparte was a fellow ornithologist with whom Audubon
had had relations of mixed amicability, and is known for such works as A Geographical
and Comparative List of the Birds of Europe and North America, and Birds of Mexico.
8 David Knight, The Age of Science: The Scientific World-view in the Nineteenth
Century (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986): 113.
9 Letter to Edward Harris, quoted in Hart-Davis, 226.
10 Brown, 13.
11 Brown, 12.
Above, at right: Brasilian
Caracara Eagle, Polyborus vulgaris; Plate CLXI
from The
Birds of America.
- David C. Alan,
Art Technician
The following persons are acknowledged
for their contributions to and assistance with Audubon's
Birds of America: Selections from the "Amsterdam
Edition": Prof. Gary Filerman, Director of the
Health Systems Administration Program
at Georgetown University's School of Nursing and Health
Studies, and Melvin Goldfein
were the donors of the "Amsterdam Edition".
Assistance was provided by Marty Barringer,
Associate University Librarian Emeritus for Special Collections;
Karen H. O'Connell, Reference Librarian;
and David
Hagen, Graphic Artist with the Library's
Gelardin New Media Center.
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