American painter and naturalist, born (in what is now Haiti) as the illegitimate Jean Rabine, adopted as Jean-Jacques Fougere by his father and step-mother, and self-christened as John James Audubon. The ‘American woodsman’ turned himself from a failed store-keeper into a far-ranging naturalist and world-renowned painter of birds and other wildlife.
Audubon spent much of his early adulthood trying desperately to make a living, moving from one failed business to the next. Broke, but married with two sons, his wife finally suggested that perhaps he could make some money from the talent that was to make him famous: depicting native American birds in life-size images, situated in contrived, imaginative approximations of their wild habitats and natural states. While his wife worked and supported the family, Audubon first wandered much of the United States east of the Mississippi – living off the land, killing the birds in order to study them closely, and attempting to capture their true...
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Bibliography
Audubon, J. J., 1986. Audubon Reader: the Best Writings of John James Audubon (ed. Sanders, S. R.). Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 245 pp.
Audubon, J. J., 1993. Birds of America (ed. Blaugrund, A., and Stebbins, T. E. Jr). New York: Villard Books and Random House, for the New York Historical Society, 382 pp.
Audubon, M. R., 1897. Audubon and his Journals. New York: Scribner, 2 vols.
Ford, A., 1964. John James Audubon. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 488 pp.
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© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Young, G.L. (1999). Audubon, John James (1785–1851). In: Environmental Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_25
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