John James Audubon
The Nature of the American Woodsman
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4889350 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Leslie Kemp Poole (Rollins College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 105 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 168-168 |
| Publication date | 2018-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jay059 |
| OpenAlex | W2803509193 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
John James Audubon's drawings and paintings of birds were carefully crafted. He used freshly killed species (the best way to see them up close in the nineteenth century) that still retained their color. Then he posed them on a board with wire to achieve a sense of movement and drama that would infuse his art. Once satisfied with the bird's shape, Audubon would draw it on the spot. This meticulous technique would earn Audubon a place in bird lovers' hearts and distinguish him from other artists of the period, notably with the publication between 1827 and 1838 of his “Great Work”—The Birds of America, a four-volume oversized collection of bird illustrations (p. 1). It remains valuable today, with one copy selling for $11.5 million in 2010. But birds were not the only things he fashioned. In this new biography, the historian Gregory H. Nobles demonstrates that Audubon also constructed a masculine persona for himself to capture the era's imagination—that of an “American Woodsman” who was as much at home in the dense forests and among common citizenry of his adopted homeland as he was in the salons of the scientific snobs who were late to recognize his contribution to ornithology
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biography · Biology · Drama · Homeland · Ornithology · Painting · Period (music · Political science · Southern Hemisphere · Visual arts · Archaeology and Natural History · Ecology · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2024 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |