John James Audubon

John James Audubon was born Jean-Jacques Rabin on 26 April 1785 in Les Cayes, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, the son of a French naval officer and a chambermaid. He was raised in Nantes, France, by his father and stepmother, and as a boy received some schooling and naval or military training in France, including time in La Rochelle, Paris, and Rochefort-sur-Mer, along with private tutoring in drawing, geography, mathematics, fencing, and music. He later studied art informally in Paris for a short period. He had no documented academic degree.

In 1803 his father sent him to the United States, in part to manage family property near Philadelphia and in part to avoid conscription, and it was there that he took the name John James Audubon. He married Lucy Bakewell in 1808, and the couple moved through a series of business ventures in Kentucky and elsewhere that repeatedly failed, freeing Audubon, by necessity as much as choice, to devote himself to studying and drawing American birds in the field.

That work culminated in The Birds of America, a set of 435 hand-colored, life-size bird plates engraved chiefly by Robert Havell Jr. and issued to subscribers in parts from 1827 to 1838, printed in England in the double elephant folio format. Audubon paired the plates with an accompanying text, Ornithological Biography, written with the Scottish naturalist William MacGillivray and published from 1831 to 1839, and later produced The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, issued from 1845 to 1848. His scientific standing in his own lifetime is reflected in memberships and fellowships in learned societies in Edinburgh, London, and the United States during the 1820s and 1830s. He died on 27 January 1851 at his home, known as Minnie's Land, in northern Manhattan, and is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery near 155th Street and Broadway in New York City.

Audubon's reputation was established early, both as an artist and as a naturalist, and the two were never fully separable in how his work was judged. The French naturalist Georges Cuvier is reported to have praised the plates in terms that captured how contemporaries received the scale of the project as much as any single image, though the exact wording of that praise is not confirmed here. Some naturalists of his own era objected to the dramatic poses and settings he gave his birds, accustomed as they were to flatter, more schematic scientific illustration, but that same dramatic quality is what later curators and historians have pointed to as his lasting contribution: turning ornithological record-keeping into a body of monumental, unmistakably artistic work. His legacy today is carried as much by institutions, museums, libraries, and the conservation organization that bears his name, as by ongoing critical writing.

Audubon's auction market is concentrated in complete copies of The Birds of America rather than in individual paintings. The all-time record is a subscriber's copy that sold for GBP 7,321,250, reported at the time as roughly USD 11.4 to 11.5 million, at Sotheby's in London on 7 December 2010, and multiple market reports describe this sale as still the record price for an Audubon folio. A further complete folio sold for USD 8,802,500 at Christie's New York on 10 March 2000. Another complete folio sold at Christie's New York on 20 January 2014, with the price reported as USD 7,922,500 by one source and USD 9,650,000 by another; both figures remain below the 2010 and 2000 results, and the discrepancy is unresolved in the sources available. Individual hand-colored plates from the folio also circulate at auction and through specialist dealers, generally at prices far below a complete set, though the dossier used for this profile does not confirm specific recent results for single plates or for original watercolors and paintings, and none should be assumed.

Almost all of the highest documented prices for Audubon's work belong to complete copies of The Birds of America, not to individual prints or to his rarer paintings and watercolors, so a given result depends heavily on which category of object is being sold. There is no catalogue raisonne of his paintings or watercolors, and no contemporary gallery represents an "estate" in the way a living artist's estate would be represented; authentication of folio material rests on bibliographic census records, physical evidence in the paper and plates, and the judgment of specialist dealers and major auction houses. Collectors should also be careful with the artist's name: market and reference sources consistently resolve "John J. Audubon" to John James Audubon, born Jean-Jacques Rabin, and treat variant spellings such as "Audobon" or the fuller "Audubon, John James Laforest" as referring to the same individual.