United States
£ GBP
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes, the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years, and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world.
Rhodes shows us young Audubon arriving in New York from France in 1803, his illegitimacy a painful secret, speaking no English but already drawing and observing birds. We see him falling in love, marrying the wellborn English girl next door, crossing the Appalachians to frontier Kentucky to start a new life, fashioning himself into an American just as his adopted country was finding its identity.
Here is Audubon exploring the wilderness of birds-pelicans wading the shallows of interior rivers, songbirds flocking, passenger pigeons darkening the skies-and teaching himself to revivify them in glorious life-size images. Now he finds his calling: to take his hundreds of watercolour drawings to England to be engraved in a great multivolume work called The Birds of America.
