Oddlet: John James Audubon · 1 min read
Sep 10, 2026
The Man Who Painted the Dead
How do you paint a wild bird at exact life size without it moving?
John James Audubon set out to paint every bird in America at exact life size. He mostly succeeded. The Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838, runs to 435 hand-colored plates and 1,065 figures across roughly 489 species, printed on sheets nearly forty inches tall.
To paint a bird from life, Audubon first shot it.
By 1807 he had refined the method. He killed with fine shot to keep the plumage whole, often dropping many of the same species before one arrived intact. He carried the fresh corpse home, drove sharpened wires through its body into a gridded backing board, and arranged the wings, feet, and beak into whatever lunge or stoop he wanted. A matching grid on his paper let him copy the pose at one-to-one scale. The lunging hawk on the page is a hawk on wires. The songbird mid-song has been dead since breakfast.
When a plate was finished, he often ate the model. Snowy owl he pronounced not indelicate, like chicken. Young bald eagle tasted of veal. The white pelican was rank, fishy, and nauseous.
Every living bird in the greatest book of American nature is a corpse on wires, pretending.
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- Wikipedia - John James Audubon — Comprehensive biography with dates, business failures, family details, citizenship (1812), arrival in England (1826), Birds of America production details, and documentation of scientific misconduct and grave-robbing.
- Wikipedia - The Birds of America — Specific quantitative facts: 435 plates, ~489 species, Double Elephant folio dimensions (39.5 x 28.5 inches), $1,000 subscription price, ~120 surviving complete sets, 2010 Sotheby's sale price of GBP 7.32M.
- National Audubon Society - 'The Myth of John James Audubon' by Gregory Nobles — Detailed documentation of Audubon's slaveholding (9 enslaved people in Henderson), 1819 sale of two enslaved men in New Orleans, his 1834 letter opposing British emancipation, and his grave-robbing for Samuel Morton's craniology.
- NPR - National Audubon Society keeps name despite racist history — Covers the March 2023 board decision to keep the Audubon name, the resulting resignations of three board members, and chapter defections in Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and Washington, D.C.
- Audubon Prints - Method and Technique — Details his 1807 innovation of using wires and threads on a gridded board to pose freshly-killed specimens in lifelike attitudes at exact life size.
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