Denis Clavreul, artist, biologist, and Frenchman, acquired it into his head to observe the identical paths blazed, within the first a part of the nineteenth century, by John James Audubon, additionally an artist and in addition a Frenchman (born in Haiti) — although not a lot of a biologist or naturalist. The result’s this massive and good-looking e book, an homage, Within the Footsteps of Audubon, with beautiful watercolors and entertaining and evocative writing.
So as to create his dramatic, masterly work, ultimately reproduced and issued below the title The Birds of America, Audubon traveled, at numerous factors within the first a part of the nineteenth century, throughout Pennsylvania and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to Louisiana; alongside the Atlantic Coast from Charleston, South Carolina to the Florida Keys; to New England after which Labrador; and alongside the Missouri River into the Dakotas. Every chapter of Clavreul’s e book covers his revisitation of certainly one of these prolonged Audubon journeys, with a remaining chapter protecting New York Metropolis, the place Audubon first set foot on American soil, in 1803. (His journey to Labrador was the topic of one other fantastic e book, Audubon: America’s Best Naturalist and His Voyage of Discovery to Labrador, by Peter B. Logan, reviewed beforehand on this website by Carrie.)
Clavruel’s e book isn’t a day-by-day recreation of Audubon’s numerous itineraries, however relatively a unfastened investigation of “areas and birds unknown to me,” he says, prompted by his “need to fulfill and sketch individuals who dwell every day involved with nature.” However many of the e book “is extra a selective meditation on Audubon and historical past,” as David Allen Sibley says in his admiring Introduction.
So Clavruel makes use of the info of Audubon’s life every now and then, as applicable, with occasional references, for instance, to his, and his spouse Lucy’s, diary entries and letters. Generally, in these tough and primitive days, their luck was good: as Lucy wrote about their flatboat journey down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, previous Wheeling and Cincinnati, to Louisville, “the seven hundred miles by water was carried out with out a lot fatigue although not with out some disagreeables.” They couldn’t use sails, she says, as a result of “the numerous activates the river . . . brings the wind from each quarter in the midst of an hour or two.” (Their journey took ten days; Clavruel’s, largely by automotive, was considerably faster.)
However the primary attraction of the e book, it should be stated, isn’t Clavreul’s prose however his artistry in watercolor. Birds, mammals and different wildlife, people and landscapes are all rendered magnificently. Possibly that’s so as a result of he labored fully from life and never images, he says. Listed here are a bunch of his Japanese phoebes and Home wrens surrounding Audubon’s home in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania (“ever to me a blessed spot,” Audubon known as it); it’s now an adjunct of the John James Audubon Heart.
Audubon is an outsized determine in American historical past, and ornithology, however isn’t universally admired. Some ornithologists regard Audubon as an ideal artist and a few artists regard him as an ideal ornithologist, as creator Jack E. Davis factors out in his e book printed earlier this yr, The Bald Eagle: The Unbelievable Journey of America’s Chook. Then again, Davis is, after all, a giant fan of the Bald Eagle, as Audubon was not.
The prose of Within the Footsteps of Audubon is a translation from the French, with the occasional quirks that such translations usually appear to have, most of them unnoticeable besides to pedants. (The plural of carp, for instance, the fish and noun, isn’t carps however carp — that type of stuff.) Thankfully watercolor wants no translation, and what Clavreul calls his “lengthy companionship with Audubon” has resulted in a stunning e book, with work which can be “the visible equal,” (to borrow, as soon as once more, from David Allen Sibley’s Introduction) “of poetry.”
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Within the Footsteps of Audubon. Denis Clavreul. Princeton College Press. 237 pp., $39.95, £30.00, November 1, 2022. ISBN: 9780691237688 (hardcover); ISBN 9780691241555 (e-book).
