Episode 79: Artist in Landscape

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This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

This specimen was approximately 1.8 meters tall, weighing roughly 72 kilos.

Hair was thick and brown in color at the time of observation, July of 1817, in a field of marsh grass located north-northeast of Louisville, Kentucky.

The specimen demonstrated keen eyesight and the capacity to move swiftly while maintaining a quiet, stealthy bearing, so as best to track its prey.

Its vocalizations, while infrequent in this environment, as again stealth was a vital component in its hunting strategy, was notable for its varied tone, pitch, and volume, and for its French accent,

which was known to make the lady swoon.

So it was when the specimen, born Jean-Jacques Audubon, on a plantation owned by his parents in Haiti in 1791, met Miss Lucy Bakewell at her parents' estate in Pennsylvania.

He was 18, a year her senior, and had emigrated to the States the year before, when he changed his name to the more American-sounding John James Audubon.

And Lucy Bakewell had never met anyone like him before, with his long flowing hair, with the accent, and this fire, this thing in his eyes.

She certainly hadn't seen that thing in the men in her own family, not in her stern patrician father, the English gentleman who preached the virtues of discipline, of a quiet home and quiet daughters, who once caught Lucy and her sisters weeping over the plight of doomed lovers in a romance novel,

and then tossed it in the fire.

This young visitor, this peculiar boy with the hair and the eyes and the Frenchman's charm, had life in him.

The kind that is undeniable.

Especially when discovered by a 17-year-old girl.

Especially when all she knows of love is what she had seen in her own home.

And maybe she was only 17.

But she was old enough to know how different that love looked than what she'd seen in that novel in the fire.

Lucy Bakewell had had been told all her life what sort of life she would lead, as the daughter of a Bakewell, as the wife of some Bakewell-approved gentleman, as the mother of some acceptable number of hyphenated Bakewells.

But a life for this Audubon boy,

who knew where that would lead?

So she fell hard.

He did too.

For his part, Audubon would write in letters, would have shouted to the heavens because he was a boy who would do things like shout to the heavens.

Then he fell in love with her in that first moment, there in the living room of her parents' home, when he knew, as he wrote, that his heart would follow every one of her footsteps.

Father wasn't happy.

But when was father ever happy?

And Lucy and John James were married.

And before long they were off to the wilds of Kentucky, and living a life of adventure.

as promised by that thing in that boy's eyes.

Lucy was happy to learn in those first that John James was who he had seemed to be that day in the living room.

He was impulsive and funny and bold, good in bed, we read in their letters.

He loved dancing, he loved skating and music and nature and noise.

And she loved him all the more for it.

And perhaps more than anything, she learned.

He loved birds.

Would call out their names, would watch them in the swaying treetops for hours, all day, would stalk them and hunt them and study the specimens he'd collect, and then thread thin wire through their bodies, and another through their tail feathers, and another up through their heads.

And he'd pin their bodies to a board just so, arranging the spread of their wings, the delicate lift of their beaks.

And he would draw them.

And the drawings.

The drawings were phenomenal.

They just were.

And Lucy could judge.

She was a Bakewell, raised to be a lady, had gone to fine schools, schools, had been to museums, had admired paintings and prints, poured over pictures in the fine volumes on the orderly shelves in her family's exemplary library.

There was such life imbued in these dead birds,

and they made her love them even more.

And that love was useful to fuel their lives through hard times out in the frontier, in lonely days when John James was on his own.

Or rather out with his birds.

The couple ran a general store in Louisville.

It did fairly well for a while.

And one day a Scotsman, well-heeled and high-collared, came in with something to sell instead of something to buy.

His name was Alexander Wilson, and he was traveling America, creating an ornithology, a comprehensive study of the New Nation's birds.

And would Mr.

Audubon like to take a look at samples of the pictures of these birds Wilson had with him in a portfolio?

and perhaps subscribe to the ornithology and receive copies of the work upon its completion.

He had already sold many hundreds of dollars worth of subscriptions.

Oh,

would he?

So here is Audubon, having spent the past several years of his life doing one very specific thing.

And into his general store wanders perhaps the only other man in North America who had been doing that same thing.

John's eyes went wide.

And then he looked at the drawings and went wider still.

He declined to subscribe.

That night, John and Lucy must have tittered like plovers.

For Wilson's work sucked.

Like, completely.

His drawings were cartoonish.

Even if you were just turning to it as a work of scientific reference, the proportions were all wrong.

The colors, the lay of the feathers, the shape of the claws were just wrong.

And Audubons, Audubons were art.

These weren't merely specimens replicated for study.

These were creatures reanimated, honored.

Moments in time not merely captured, but created and perfected and populated with living things, bodies with substance, with agency, eyes with a keen intelligence that was their own, that was avian.

A creature met on its own terms.

with respect, with wonder.

That's what Lucy had seen.

There in the page.

There in her husband.

And she loved her husband.

And he loved her, make no mistake.

In reading their recollections of this time in Kentucky, of young people in a young country, skinny dipping in the Ohio River, raising young children, Lucy at home playing her piano, John James in his element, out with the birds, painting and dreaming.

You don't doubt for a moment that things were good for a while.

But John James's business failed.

Many did then.

The economy was bad for everyone.

But John James did his family no favors.

Bad move after bad move, landed Audubon in debtor's prison, and then bankruptcy.

And they had to sell everything.

The store, their home, Lucy's piano.

It was terrible.

And their daughter, just two years old, died shortly thereafter.

Another daughter died too, just seven months old.

And they had nothing but their two sons and their grief and their love

and his art.

And they remembered that day when the Scotsman came in with his birds that were nothing like Audubons, nothing like birds, and remembered his book and that people had bought it despite that.

And they came up with a plan.

A dream, really.

John James would set out to paint the birds of America.

Each one.

He would hunt them and pin them and pose them and paint them.

Each one life-sized,

in a book unlike any the world had ever seen.

And he would return with riches.

A return on the investment of Lucy's devotion.

He would do that, if she would just keep faith in him.

And of course she could, for this man had this thing in his eyes, had it still.

John James Audubon went off to paint his birds.

Down to Louisiana.

He took to the woods.

The couple wrote passionate letters back and forth about how Lucy and the kids missed him but were making due.

Lucy worked as a tutor in exchange for room and board in a wealthy family's home.

They had very little but faith in John James'

work.

She would tell him that.

How her faith in him kept her going.

How she'd be there for him until they could be together.

Meanwhile, he was scraping by, drawing chalk portraits of wealthy men and women.

He'd write to Lucy of how his own faith was growing, how his work was improving.

He wrote to her of his experiences out there on his own, an artist out in the world, about a wealthy patroness who would invite him into her parlor to paint her in the nude, and weren't these experiences he was having just wonderful.

Still Lucy supported him and said she would wait for him and bear the hardships of raising two boys on her own with little more than a roof over their heads.

And on and on that went for years.

He writing to her about his adventures and his art.

and she writing to him about her love and of unpaid bills, and a life that no longer felt like the adventure promised in that boy's eyes years before.

But much more lay ahead for John James, and his adventures took him to England, to Liverpool, where people took one look at this man with his long hair, his frontiersman's clothes, and this thing in his eyes, and were smitten in their way.

Within weeks of arriving in the new nation with no contacts, no introductions, he was showing in the biggest gallery in town.

He was being wined and dined and introduced to engravers and investors.

Within months, it was clear that the whole plan was going to pay off, that the dream was going to come true.

He would write to Lucy about his extraordinary success.

He'd send copies of invitations he'd received to fabulous parties.

He'd say he couldn't wait for her to join him there.

And she'd write back of her pleasure in his success, and how she just needed to tie up a few loose ends at home, collect a few debts owed to her from her music students, so she could pay her way to England.

And he'd write back, and it seemed like he didn't want her there at all.

No explanation.

Just that now wasn't the right time.

But oh, he had to tell her about the lords and the ladies, and how into him they all were.

How he was wearing silk stockings and shaving every morning and looking good, and

she would wait for a letter.

Wait for months.

Just what did he mean now wasn't the right time?

Why wouldn't it be the right time to be together?

When would be the right time if not this?

And back and forth they went.

She increasingly frustrated.

He increasingly increasing in wealth and fame and ego.

But also in worry.

Worry that he had pushed Lucy too far.

That he had stretched her patience too thin.

Had tested her faith one time too many.

He instructed his engraver to leave his signature off one of his prints, to put Lucy's name there instead, as a sign that the art wouldn't exist without her, that he wouldn't be who he was without her.

But he still seemed to be in no rush to be with her, as Lucy would point out in her letters back, objecting to his plan to take another 16 years to finish Birds of America, objecting to his condescension.

For how must it have felt for Lucy to know that the world was seeing in your partner what you had seen in those very first moments in your father's parlor long ago and be stuck as a boarder in a Louisiana backwater, parsing out meaning from missives sent months before.

John James Audubon wondered the same thing.

At 41 years old, Having sold thousands upon thousands of dollars of pictures of birds to libraries and lords and ladies and the king and queen of England themselves.

He had seen his dreams realized, but realized he was about to lose his wife.

So he rushed home, insomuch as a trip across an ocean, across the thousand miles of wilderness, down the Ohio River, down the Mississippi River, through the Louisiana bayou,

can be considered rushing.

But the last bit, the last bit was rushing flat out, on a borrowed horse, to his wife's borrowed room,

where he found her teaching piano and called out her name from the doorway.

And they fell into each other's arms and vowed never to be apart again.

And that, for the most part, turned out to be so.

She traveled with him to England and back again, resuming the life of adventure promised those years ago.

The life that Lucy had to put on pause while John James lived his.

But their shared adventure didn't last much longer.

First his eyesight went

and he couldn't draw anymore.

But worse, his mind went too and his memory.

Some form of dementia.

Alzheimer's, people think now.

That thing in his eyes, that fire, that life.

was gone years before he died.

One morning in New York, on his way out to look for birds.

Lucy lived without him for 21 years.

21 more years.

In those 21 years, she taught.

One of her sons lost all their money.

The other son was in an accident, and she spent three years by his side until he died.

She sold John James's paintings.

She had to, in the plates from which they printed the birds of America.

The word people use when speaking of Lucy Bakewell Audubon in these last years before her death is is destitute.

And that word seems fair.

She died at 87 years old, in a bed in the home of her brother, on a June day in 1874.

Perhaps not the worst place to end a life,

but a hard place to end a story.

So let's take Lucy Bakewell.

and John James Audubon

and reposition them

and lift their chins just so.

Let's strip away the background, the bedroom in their brother's home.

Let's choose a setting from another time,

before the hardship, and the Alzheimer's

and the broken promises.

And let's place them in a wagon,

heading west toward the frontier, toward the unknown.

Lucy's father's home receding in the distance.

A young couple, newly married, in a new nation,

with a smile on her face

and this thing in his eyes.

This episode was originally released in 2015, written and produced by me.

The show currently gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

It is a proud member of Radiotopia,

a network of individually owned and operated independent podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

I was hoping to have a new episode done.

In fact, I was getting really close to a new episode and then I contracted COVID and I don't have it in me this week.

So I really like that one and you'll have a new episode before too long.

Thanks for hanging in with me.

I am doing fine.

COVID is weird.

And I'm sure I'll be well fine.

I'm sure I'll be well soon.

See?

COVID brain.

Anyway, Anyway,

I hope you're enjoying your summer and new episodes are coming right down the pike.

Thanks for your patience.

Take care.

Radiotopian

from PRX