John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
for Wilson, at least at the time he showed up in Audubon’s store. A gruff and grumbling Scotsman who had worked as a weaver and then as a political activist and largely unsuccessful poet in his native Scotland, Wilson had failed at essentially everything he had attempted. Feeling financially frustrated and politically persecuted in Scotland, he left for the United States in 1794, but the new land of opportunity didn’t seem to help. He faced yet another string of occupational failures, from weaving to day labor, the final straw being teaching in a school in Gray’s Ferry, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. Wilson had worked as a schoolteacher before, and he approached this new post with something less than pedagogical enthusiasm: “I shall recommence that painful profession once more with the same gloomy, sullen resignation that a prisoner re-enters his dungeon or a malefactor mounts the scaffold,” he wrote to a friend, offering a prediction that this new position would not turn out to be a success.35 It didn’t.
While in the Philadelphia area, however, Wilson had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of several of the city’s prominent men—most usefully the naturalist William Bartram and the engraver Alexander Lawson—who became allies, both personally and financially, in encouraging him to try his hand at art. Even sympathetic friends might reasonably have surmised that, for a forlorn loser like Wilson, there seemed precious little left. Still, with some helpful lessons under Bartram’s guidance, Wilson finally decided upon his life’s true (and final) calling: “I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a collection of all the birds in this part of North America,” he declared. That collection would eventually become the nine-volume compendium of bird drawings and written descriptions, American Ornithology (1808–1814).36 On the first page of the first volume, Wilson made the high-minded declaration that he wanted only to “draw the attention of my fellow-citizens … to a contemplation of the grandeur, harmony, and wonderful variety of Nature,” adding that “lucrative views have nothing to do in the business.”37
Figure 2. Portrait of Alexander Wilson, probably painted by Thomas Sully, 1809–1813. Oil on wood, 23 1/4 x 22 inches. American Philosophical Society, gift of Dr. Nathaniel Chapman, 1822.
Wilson certainly turned out to be right about the “lucrative” part. Putting behind him the comparative comfort and support he enjoyed in Philadelphia, he started stumping the country off and on for a couple of years, lugging around examples of his work to show potential customers in order to secure subscriptions to his larger but still incomplete project. (At the time Wilson happened to come to Louisville, only the first volumes had begun to appear in print, in a limited edition of two hundred copies.) A subscriber to American Ornithology would be expected to come up with $120 for the full work, a hefty sum that only prosperous individuals and institutions could afford, and even many of them seemed disinclined to pay the price. In one instance, Wilson complained, a potential purchaser of American Ornithology “turned over a few leaves very carelessly; asked some trifling questions; and then threw the book down, saying—I don’t intend to give an hundred and twenty dollars for the knowledge of birds!” After picking up his sample volumes and heading for the door, Wilson later grumbled that if “science depended on such animals as these, the very name would ere now have been extinct.”38 After suffering a depressing share of such insults and indifference, Wilson came to Louisville with no celebrity billing, just four letters of introduction that he hoped would open the doors of “all the characters likely to subscribe” and, most important, with the two volumes of his bird drawings, which he wearily lay on the counter in Audubon’s store.39
As Audubon later related the opening moments of their meeting, Wilson’s work seemed almost too good to be true and too good to pass up—at least at first viewing. Even though he could hardly afford to do so, Audubon was about to sign his name to the subscription list when, just then, his partner, Rozier, stopped him. After looking at Wilson’s bird images, Rozier whispered to Audubon (in French, their common tongue) that Audubon’s own drawings were “certainly far better” and that Audubon himself was just as good as Wilson: “You must know as much of the habits of American birds as this gentleman.” A bit awkwardly and perhaps a bit too suddenly, Audubon backed away from his decision to subscribe to Wilson’s work. Wilson seemed annoyed, Audubon continued, but he asked to see Audubon’s own images, and Audubon laid a portfolio of his own drawings before his visitor. Wilson found it hard to believe that anyone else had also begun the same sort of work on birds, and, like any suddenly insecure author, he asked Audubon if he planned to publish his images. When Audubon said no, Wilson then asked if he could borrow some of Audubon’s drawings, and Audubon said yes. Audubon also suggested the possibility of an artistic collaboration, or at least collegial attribution. Even though he remained convinced of his decision not to subscribe to Wilson’s work—“for, even at that time, my collection was greater than his”—he did think that Wilson might be willing to print some of his images: “I offered them to him, merely on condition that what I had drawn, or might afterwards draw and send to him, should be mentioned in his work, as coming from my pencil.” Wilson never took him up on the offer, however, and the Scotsman soon left Louisville, “little knowing how much his talents were appreciated in our little town, at least by myself and my friends.” That, at least, was Audubon’s version of the encounter, which he published in the first volume of Ornithological Biography in 1831.40
For his own part, Wilson never wrote much about his visit to Louisville, and he never mentioned Audubon by name in American Ornithology. He did, however, offer a few details in his diary. On March 19, he wrote that he examined Audubon’s drawings, which he pronounced “very good,” and he noted that Audubon had two new birds, “both Motacillae,” or warblers. The following two days he went out shooting, once with Audubon, but he also complained he had “no naturalist to keep me company,” thus excluding Audubon from that category. Finally, he departed the town, giving a very different ending to the story: “I bade adieu to Louisville … but neither received one act of civility … one subscriber, nor one new bird,” he grumped. “Science or literature has not one friend in this place.”41 Neither, apparently, did Wilson, who left town with a bitter taste in his mouth.
And that, after a week, was apparently that. Audubon wrote about seeing Wilson only one more time, during a brief visit Audubon made to Philadelphia in 1811, a polite but chilly-seeming meeting that left Audubon feeling that “my company was not agreeable.” No matter how that second encounter went—or if it happened at all—that was the end of the personal relationship between them.42 Two years later, Wilson was dead, brought down by dysentery and the general debilitations of too much time spent tramping around outdoors, trying to find birds to paint and, perhaps even more difficult, customers to buy his bird paintings.
So the story is told, from both Audubon’s perspective and Wilson’s, neither of which may be absolutely accurate. Wilson’s parting shot at Louisville and its inhabitants might have been sharpened in print by Wilson’s posthumous promoter, George Ord, whose hostility to Audubon, as we shall see, grew to be all but boundless. In turn, Audubon’s more upbeat telling of Wilson’s warm reception in Louisville clearly came in response to Ord’s published account of Wilson’s unhappy departure, thus putting himself in a more positive and hospitable light. (Like Ernest Hemingway’s treatment of F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, Audubon’s description of Wilson in Ornithological Biography underscores an important point: Whoever lives longer gets the last and most self-serving word.) Still, for all the questions and caveats surrounding the competing narratives, the Audubon-Wilson encounter stands as the most famous human sighting in the history of American ornithology, and it invites speculation about the meaning of this remarkable meeting.
First, this unlikely encounter raises a simple but significant question: Was Rozier right? Was Audubon’s work actually better than Wilson’s? It would take a bird-by-bird analysis of the images both men had at the time even to begin to answer that question conclusively, and even then, it would probably be impossible to reach any all-encompassing artistic or ornithological judgment. Still, a one-bird comparison—in this case, of the Belted Kingfisher—can provide a good idea of the talents of the two artists at the time of their