This Strange Wilderness: The Life and Art of John James Audubon (5 page)

Then he met Mrs. Pirrie.

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On the Wing

Lucretia Pirrie was the wife of James Pirrie, the owner of a cotton plantation called Oakley. The Pirries had a fifteen-year-old daughter, Eliza. Since there were no schools near Oakley, Mrs. Pirrie invited Audubon to work there for a while as Eliza’s tutor. He would be paid sixty dollars a month, and his duties would be light. With no better plans before him, he couldn’t say no.

Oakley was located north of New Orleans in West Feliciana Parish (a Louisiana
parish
is similar to a county). When Audubon and Mason arrived, they felt as if they had entered another world. The land was hilly, the soil red. Spanish moss hung from oaks and cypress trees, giving the countryside a dark and haunted look. Best of all were the sweet magnolia woods, home to countless birds. It was June, mating time for the winged creatures—what Audubon called the “love season.” The air echoed with song.

Oakley plantation house was cool inside, shaded from the heat by trees and shuttered windows. The two wandering artists settled in. For
half the day, Audubon instructed “My Lovely Miss Pirrie” in drawing, dancing, music, math, and even the art of making decorative objects out of braided hair.
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The rest of the day was his. He hiked through woods and fields and slogged through swamps, armed with a stick big enough to fend off alligators. The Feliciana country was also on the Mississippi River Flyway, so there were many thousands of birds—robins and wrens, hawks and herons, woodpeckers and kites. Before Audubon drew a bird, he would spend days observing it and taking notes. “Nature
must
be seen first alive, and well studied, before attempts are made at representing it,” he believed.
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He wanted to know everything—what the birds ate, where they slept, how they found their mates and cared for their young. Because he thought of birds’ inner lives in terms of human emotions, he was interested in their personalities, too. Were they meek or fierce, shy or sociable? Blue jays ate other birds’ eggs, so according to Audubon, they were thieves and mischief makers—not unlike some people he knew.

He also thought of birdcalls in human terms—the cry of the bald eagle was like the “laugh of a maniac.”
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He could identify every bird by listening, so when he heard an unfamiliar call, he suspected that it came from an unknown species. Most of the new species that he discovered, he
would find in Feliciana. This corner of the world became his favorite place, and he called it Happyland.

When he walked into Happyland, he walked in with his gun. “You must be aware,” he once wrote, “that I call birds few, when I shoot less than one hundred per day.”
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By obtaining many specimens of a single species, he could better understand the general characteristics of that species. After he drew a bird, his work as a naturalist began. First he measured every part of the bird, even the length of its tongue. Then he dissected it, examining its organs and the contents of its stomach. Male and female of a species, young and old—Audubon the naturalist wanted to know his subjects literally inside and out.

“The naturalist . . . ought to be an artist also.”
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Ever since the trip down the Mississippi, Audubon had been experimenting with color, and in Louisiana, his genius began to shine. He used pastel and watercolor together, layering and blending them, rubbing the colors with his finger or a piece of cork to create effects as rich and soft as feathers. He added other media, too. Pencil or black ink was perfect for delicate things such as spider webs or the legs of a bug. Oil paint formed a tree branch here, a cloud there. Gold metallic paint was just right for the flash of a feather, clear glaze for the gleam of an eye. This mix was something new in painting—a revolution quietly taking shape among the magnolias.

Louisiana was full of snakes, as well as birds. One of Audubon’s most startling pictures, done at Oakley, shows a confrontation between four mockingbirds and a rattlesnake. The snake, coiled in a tree, is poised to strike while the birds, which Audubon admired for their “undaunted courage,” defend their eggs.
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The artist used as his model a dead rattler almost six feet long. With Eliza Pirrie sketching next to him, he worked on the drawing for sixteen hours in the summer heat. He always liked
to finish a picture at one sitting, but this time he couldn’t—the stench became too strong. The finished picture,
Northern Mockingbird
, is only one of many scenes in which Audubon shows the natural world as a place where every living thing must struggle to survive.

Mrs. Pirrie began to think that Eliza was starting to like her tutor a little too much. She told Audubon to leave, allowing him only ten days to organize and pack all his notes and drawings. When he asked to be paid for some classes that his pupil had missed, Mrs. Pirrie flew into a rage. Humiliated, Audubon was not sad to leave “the Ladies of Oakley.” But it was “not so with the sweet Woods around us, to leave them was painfull.”
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He and Joseph caught a steamboat back to New Orleans.

In the city once again, Audubon cut his hair—his “horse’s mane”—and bought a good suit of clothes.
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He hoped that his new look would be more pleasing to the respectable folk he met on the street. He listed all he had accomplished since leaving Cincinnati: “62 Drawings of
Birds
& Plants
, 3 quadrupeds, 2 Snakes, 50 Portraits of all sorts.”
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But he was lonelier than ever and missed his family so much that he wrote in his journal, “Wished myself off this Miserable Stage.”
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Lucy had finally promised to join him, but she wouldn’t say when. Then on December 18, 1821, she did arrive, along with twelve-year-old Victor and Johnny, nine. After a year of separation, the Audubons were together again, living in a tiny house on Dauphine Street.

Lucy still had to support the family. She worked as a governess in New Orleans, then found a teaching job—and a home for her sons—at Beech Woods, another plantation in Feliciana. Jane Percy, an outspoken widow, was its owner. There Lucy set up a little school, which attracted children from the surrounding countryside, and she was soon beloved in the community. Her husband, however, was looked
on by some as an eccentric, even a “madman.”
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“My wife and family alone gave me encouragement,” wrote John.
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Even after Lucy had come to Louisiana, Audubon and Mason continued as itinerant artists. One of the best pictures from their travels is the
Black-billed Cuckoo
—bird by Audubon, flowers and leaves by Mason. By 1822 Joseph had been traveling with Audubon for two years and had painted about fifty backgrounds for his teacher. His father had died while he was away, and he now decided that it was time to go home. So ended one of America’s finest art collaborations, although when Audubon published his work, he would give Mason no credit.

Jane Percy hired Audubon to paint a portrait of her daughters, but it seemed that fighting with his employers was becoming a habit. When Mrs. Percy complained that he had made her daughters’ skin look too yellow, it was Audubon’s turn to fly into a rage. How dare anyone criticize him, of all people, on
color
! He was immediately kicked off the property.

But he had painted one masterpiece after another in Louisiana, and he believed that it was time to find a publisher. In 1824 he set out to try his luck in Philadelphia, the nation’s center of art, science, and learning. Somewhere on the journey north, he wrote to his old business partner: “I am yet, my dear Rozier, on the wing and God only knows how long I may yet remain so.”
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It was spring when he arrived. He soon found friends and admirers, including the famous portrait painter Thomas Sully and the ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte, nephew of the emperor Napoleon. But Alexander Wilson, who had died in 1813, was still recognized in Philadelphia as the greatest ornithologist, and when Audubon dared to criticize him, he made some powerful enemies. They mocked Audubon as the “trader naturalist,” called his work “ill-drawn.”
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