James Baquet

    Today we meet the first of two “double-threats.” They were both Francophones, both born within a couple of years of each other, and both died in the same year. Significantly they were known as both artists and scientists.

    And there the similarities end. We will discuss Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) next time, but today we look at the Haitian-born American John James Audubon (1785-1851).

    Audubon’s father was a French landowner in Saint-Domingue, now the country of Haiti; his mother was a servant in his father’s house, and died when the baby was only a few months old. With his father and his half-sister by another servant woman, the boy returned to France around age four, where he was raised by his father’s legal wife.

    As he grew, he learned to ride and fence, and loved to walk in the fields, returning home to sketch the birds’ eggs and nests he had collected. His father encouraged these artistic leanings. At 18, the lad who had been known as Jean-Jacques anglicized his name to John James and set off for the United States.

    He became a citizen and attempted to establish himself in business, but his true passion was studying and painting birds. He wrote later: “I felt an intimacy with them...bordering on frenzy...” At some point he conceived a project which was to consume the rest of his life, and become his legacy: he planned to find and paint every bird in North America, a monumental undertaking which resulted in his gargantuan “The Birds of America.”

    The book was printed over a period of 12 years, consisting of 435 engraved and hand-painted plates measuring 99 by 66 centimeters — that’s a book nearly a meter tall! It includes illustrations of six species with are today extinct. Only 120 copies are known to exist, and they fetch record prices when sold: Sotheby’s sold one for approximately $11.5 million in 2010.

    The National Audubon Society was started and named for John James Audubon a half-century after his death. It is the oldest conservation organization in the world, educating the public through its 500 chapters.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. changed to English

    2. huge, gigantic

    3. bring

    4. a small French-speaking country in the Caribbean

    5. people who speak French

    6. craziness

    7. people who can do two things well

    8. tendencies, inclinations

    9. something that someone leaves behind

    10. person who owns a lot of real estate

    11. familiarity, closeness