Stories behind the paintings

National Wildlife, Oct-Nov, 1994 by Roger Di Silvestro

BEAUTY IS TRUTH, and truth beauty, poet John Keats once wrote. And yet, for many wildlife artists across many years, combining beauty and truth in a single painting - in the form of accurate depictions of wildlife - often has proved difficult and dangerous and sometimes just plain weird.

Among the first wildlife artists of international repute to wrestle truth and beauty to the mat was John James Audubon. A trained artist, failed businessman and sometime dance instructor, French teacher and taxidermist, Audubon in 1820, at age 35, set himself a long-term goal: He would paint life-sized portraits of every bird native to North America.

For sheer bravado, few plans can match this one, In Audubon's time, many bird species were still poorly classified. The artist had few if any sources to turn to for definitive identification of the birds he sought to paint. Moreover, much of North America remained uncharted. To accomplish his goal, Audubon had to be not only an artist, but also a keen naturalist and reckless adventurer.

To ensure the accuracy of his paintings, Audubon adopted a relatively simple technique. He shot the birds he wanted to paint and mounted them upon a board with a grid drawn upon it, wiring and pinning the feathered cadavers into poses natural in life. He then drew the same grid on his painting surface. This allowed him to reproduce accurately the proportions of each bird. Sometimes he kept at a painting for 14 hours straight. Doubtless he worked up an appetite, because when he finished a painting he sometimes ate the subject.

Audubon's commitment to accuracy should have landed him in the good graces of the scientific community of his day. Instead, he wound up in some serious scientific disputes. A prime example is his painting of a tundra swan, which shows the bird swimming in a lake, with trees in the background and sulfur-yellow waterlilies in the foreground. The lilies, not the swan, landed Audubon in hot scientific water.

Audubon had rendered the yellow lilies as they were described to him by a friend, botanist Edward Leitner, who had discovered the flowers in Florida. Unfortunately, when the swan print appeared in Audubon's Birds of North America in 1838, Leitner had not yet described the yellow lily in the scientific literature. In fact, he never would, because Seminole Indians killed him before he got around to it. This left Audubon in the lurch when the swan picture was published, since at the time no one of academic repute had ever seen or heard of a yellow lily. Lilies, it was well known, were white, and nothing but.

Audubon immediately attracted scientific invectives, particularly from supporters of the late Alexander Wilson, a Philadelphia bird artist who had died in 1813. Wilsonians rightly saw Audubon as a threat to their master's preeminence in the world of avian painting. To stop his succession to the bird-painters' throne, they even blocked publication of Audubon's work in America - he had to go to England to find a publisher.

The lily problem proved no small conundrum. Botanical expects besmirched Audubon's name, and Wilson's supporters mocked Audubon mercilessly, saying that the lilies proved what they had suspected all along: that Audubon was a charlatan. The question of the lilies haunted Audubon until the day he died, in 1851. Vindication came too late for Audubon to enjoy it: Scientists did not rediscover Florida's yellow lily species until 1876.

Although Wilson partisans led the attack on Audubon's veracity, Wilson himself had left behind a blemished record for accuracy. The collection of bird print he published in 1812 including a painting of a small-headed green flycatcher. Wilson, who like Audubon painted from dead specimens, reported that he had shot several of the flycatchers and that they were quite rare.

Rare indeed. Wilson first reported them about 1810, and since then they have been observed in only two places in the entire world. One is in Wilson's book, the other is in Audubon's. The species, it seems, never existed. Wilson, some experts now think, mistook a black-throated green warbler for a new species, painted it and named it the small-headed green flycatcher. According to one Wilson biographer, Audubon, wanting nothing left out of his volume, copied the misidentified bird and claimed that he had observed it in the wild.

Some artists intentionally distorted the truth for greater drama. George Catlin, a Philadelphia portrait artist who journeyed to the Far West in the mid 1830s to record on canvas the lives of Native Americans, produced a famous painting of an Indian on horseback aiming a bow and arrow at a fleeing bull bison. To heighten the drama, Catlin showed both horse and bull with all feet off the ground, as if rocketing along in desperate pursuit. The dark bison is three or four times the size of the white horse, which looks suspiciously like a purebred Arabian horse. Although Indian ponies sometimes were small, and bison bulls could weigh up to a ton, Catlin clearly heightened the contrast to accentuate the drama.