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Other authors named John:
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Author's popularity: -1
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Popularity: 3
Vote: | A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | After all, I long to be in America again, nay, if I can go home to return no more to Europe, it seems to me that I shall ever enjoy more peace of mind, and even Physical comfort than I can meet with in any portion of the world beside. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Almost every day, instead of going to school, I made for the fields, where I spent my day. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | As I grew up I was fervently desirous of becoming acquainted with Nature. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Because my father was often absent on naval duty, my mother suffered me to do much as I pleased. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | But hopes are Shy Birds flying at a great distance seldom reached by the best of Guns. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | But the moment a bird was dead, no matter how beautiful it had been in life, the pleasure of possession became blunted for me. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Duruing all these years there existed within me a tendency to follow Nature in her walks. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Finally I paid every bill. My plantation in Pennsylvania had been sold and nothing was left to me but my humble talents. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | How could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books? |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | How strangely our Bark is tossed-Poor as Job yesterday-rich as Croesus Tomorrow!-and who could not wish to live to enjoy this Life of pleasurable anxiety? Not I believe me. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Hundreds of anecdotes I could relate. It may happen that the pages I am now scribbling over, may hereafter be published. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment. Cares I knew not, and cared naught about them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I am here in the snears of an eagle. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I can scarcely manage to scribble a tolerable English letter. I know that I am not a scholar, but meantime I am aware that no man living knows better than I do the habits of our birds. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I cannot help but think a curious event is this life of mine. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I do anything for money now a days. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I feel fully decided that we should all go to Europe together and to work as if an established Partnership for Life consisting of Husband Wife and Children. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I have now 42 Dollars, health, and as much anxiety to pursue My Plans of Accomplishing My collection as Ever I had and Hope God Will Grant Me the same Powers to proceed. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I must put myself in a train of doing... and thereby keep the machine in motion. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | I purchased excellent and beautiful horses, visited all such neighbors as I found in congenial spirits, and was as happy as happy could be. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | I rise long before day and work till nightfall, when I take a walk and go to bed. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I waged war against my feelings. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I wish I had eight pairs of hands, and another body to shoot the specimens. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If I can procure three hundred good substantial names of persons, or bodies, or institutions, I cannot fail to do well for my family, although I must abandon my life to its success, and undergo many sad perplexities and perhaps never see again my own beloved America. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | In my deepest troubles, I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Mathematics was hard, dull work. Geography pleased me more. For dancing I was quite enthusiastic. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My drawings at first were made altogether in watercolors, but they wanted softness and a great deal of finish. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | My drawings of Owls and other birds of similar plumage were much improved. I have continued the style ever since. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | My father... sailed as a sea captain to the West Indies, where in 1785 I found light and life in the New World. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My mother had several beautiful parrots and some monkeys; one of the latter was a full-grown male of a very large species. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My plan is to publish one Number at my own expense and risk, and travel with it under my arm-and beg my way. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | On landing at New York I caught the yellow fever. The kind man who commanded the ship that brought me from France took charge of me and placed me under the care of two Quaker ladies. To their skillful and untiring care I may safely say I owe my life. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | On the 17th of May, the Delos put out to sea. I was immediately affected with sea-sickness, which, however, lasted but a short time. I remained on deck constantly, forcing myself to exercise. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | One day I caught four Dolphins, how much I have gazed at these beautiful creatures... as they changed their hue in twenty varieties of richest arrangement of tints. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The Cray is certainly not a fish, but a handsome crustaceous animal. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The mercantile business did not suit me. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The Purchasing of Too Many goods sold on credit of course Lost, reduced us-Divided us. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | This Place saw My best days, My Happiest, My Wife having blessed me with Your Brother Woodhouse... I Calculated, to Live and died in Comfort, Our Business Was good of course We agreed. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | To be a good draftsman was to me a blessing. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | To Britain I owe nearly all of my success. She furnished the house of artists and engravers, R. Havell & Son, through which my labors have been presented to the world... To Britain I shall ever be grateful. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | To have been torn from the study would have been as death; my time was entirely occupied with art. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | To my Lucy I now offer myself with my stock, wares and chattels and all the devotedness of heart attached to such an enthusiastic being as I am. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | What! Have I come here to mimic nature in her grandest enterprise - to add my caricature of one of the wonders of the world to those which I see here? No - I give up the idea as a vain attempt. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When, for the first time... I left my father, and all the dear friends of my youth, to cross the great ocean... my heart sunk within me... The lingering hours were spent in deep sorrow... My affections were with those I had left behind, and the world seemed to me a great wilderness. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Who is the stranger... that can form an adequate conception of the extent of its primeval woods-of the glory of those columnar trunks, that for centuries have waved in the breeze? |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Would it be possible that I should not in any degree succeed? I can scarcely think so. Ah delusive hope, how much further wilt thou lead me? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You have seen a poor old man. |
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Biography
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John James Audubon (April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was a Franco-American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. He painted, catalogued, and described the birds of North America.
Audubon was born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and his mistress, and raised in France by his stepmother. He claimed that his early education included lessons from Jacques Louis David, later famous as a painter in revolutionary France, but this claim has been long since discredited, along with numerous other Audubon "fictions."
In 1803 his father obtained a false passport for him to travel to the United States to avoid the draft for the Napoleonic Wars.
He caught yellow fever and the sea captain placed him in a boarding house run by Quaker women who nursed him to recovery and taught him the unique Quaker form of English. In that year he met and became engaged to his neighbor Lucy Bakewell, whom he married in 1808.
He oversaw a family farm near Philadelphia and began the study of natural history by conducting the first bird-banding on the continent; he tied yarn to the legs of Eastern Phoebes and determined that they returned to the same nesting spots year after year. He also began drawing and painting birds.
After years of business success in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, he went bankrupt. This compelled him to pursue his nature study and painting more vigorously and he sailed off down the Mississippi with his gun and paintbox and assistant, intent on finding and painting all the birds of North America.
In order to draw or paint the birds, he had to shoot them first, using fine shot to prevent them from being shot to pieces. He then used fixed wires to prop them up, restoring a natural position. His birds are set true-to-life in their natural habitat. This was in stark contrast with the stiff representations of birds by his contemporaries, such as Alexander Wilson. Audubon once wrote: "I call birds few when I shoot less than one hundred per day". One of his biographers, Duff Hart-Davis, reveals: "The rarer the bird, the more eagerly he pursued it, never apparently worrying that by killing it he might hasten the extinction of its kind."
Since he had no other income, he eked out a living selling portraits on demand, while his wife, Lucy, worked as a tutor to rich plantation families. He sought a publisher for his birds in Philadelphia but was rebuffed, in part because he had earned the enmity of some of the city's leading scientists at the Academy of Natural Sciences.
Finally, in 1826 he set sail with his portfolio to London. The British couldn't get enough of images of backwoods America and he was an instant success. He was lionized as "The American Woodsman" and raised enough money to publish his Birds of America. This consisted of hand-colored, life-size prints made from engraved plates. Even King George IV was an avid fan of Audubon. He was elected a fellow of London's Royal Society. In this, he followed the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin, who was the first American fellow. While in Edinburgh to seek subscriptions for his book, he gave a demonstration of his method of using wires to prop up birds at professor Robert Jameson's Wernerian Natural History Association with the student Charles Darwin in the audience and also visited the dissecting theatre of the anatomist Robert Knox (not long before Knox became associated with Burke and Hare).
He followed his "Birds of America" up with a companion work, Ornithological Biographies, life histories of each species written with Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray. Both the books of paintings and the biographies were published between 1827 and 1839.
During that time, Audubon continued making expeditions in North America and bought an estate on the Hudson river, now Audubon Park. In 1842 he published a popular edition of Birds of America in the United States. His final work was on mammals, the Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. It was completed by his sons and son-in-law. He is buried in the Trinity Churchyard Cemetery at 155th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, New York.
The Audubon Society was established and named in his honor in 1896. Several towns and one county (in Iowa) also bear his name.
He started a General Store in Louisville, Kentucky, lived in Henderson, Kentucky, and witnessed the 1811-1812 earthquakes. He had two sons: Victor Gifford (b. June 12, 1809) and John Woodhouse (b. November 30, 1812), and two daughters: Lucy (1815-1817) and Rose (1819).
Notes Since Audubon was born illegitimate, he was at first named Jean Rabine (his mother was called Jeanne Rabine). She died six months later and in August 1788 his father took him to France to be raised by his wife, Anne Moynet. He was formally adopted in March 1789 and named Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon, which he later Americanized.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "John James Audubon".
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