Audubon's Birds of America exhibition was well advertised, with colourful images of the Carolina parrot, now long extinct, blown up on posters and banners all around the museum, inside and out and on buses and billboards across the city.
Inside the museum too, the vast glass and white ironwork atrium was filled with birdsong as though the centuries old plates on the gallery walls had sprung into life and the many birds that he captured (in images and reality) were beckoning the casual gratis visitor to cough up £10 to come and see the delights beyond the heavy exhibition doors.
Five minute exercise
As this was a consolidation session in an extensive exhibition, we didn't really have a theme and I decided to not try to steer the session but just set time limits. For our five minute session I stayed in the immersive circular space just inside the exhibition doors. Of the whole exhibition this is the most packaged, the most artificial but also the most overwhelming.
The swirling, whirling images of peace and pensive reflection, with death and violence. The saffron yellow bellies against the black wings, the small parental bird feeling a berry to its young. The hard black eyes and brown talons digging bloodily into the fish as it gawps, gasps and is carried off.
Blowing up the plates and focusing in on the detail of these powerful pictures, really shows the intense colours and also the sensitivity with which the birds are depicted. But coupling that with birdsong and the soft tracking of the images is a powerful experience that my video doesn't capture very successfully (not a surprise).
Main task
Moving into the main body of the exhibition where you can see dozens of the original plates from Audubon's book, the colours and detail are even more striking than in the audio visual display. These prints and engravings are two hundred years old but are bright, sharp and vibrant. It is hard to imagine they have been locked away for so many decades, all their colour frozen in darkness.
Almost more extraordinary than the illustrations though is John James Audubon himself. Born to a plantation owner and his maid in Haiti before the French Revolution, he owned enslaved people during his lifetime and was not an academic. However, he kept his origins hidden and managed to manoeuvre himself into polite society, the intelligentsia and even won the patronage of abolitionists. Like the exotic birds he depicted, he presented himself both as a wild man and a scientist who wore bear grease and animal skins, warned of the threat to the wildlife by humans, but also shot and hunted thousands of the birds.
Audubon was an enigmatic contradiction; he went bankrupt then secured financial backing for his opus Birds of America. He was accused (correctly) of falsifying scientific data and yet was inducted into the Royal Society, the Linnean Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was deemed untrustworthy for plagiarising and yet lauded for his achievements.
It seems that virtually all the stories about him are probably true, even though they paint an extraordinary picture.
However, the NMS exhibition is about Bird's of America, the book, and it gaining support while Audubon was in Edinburgh.
Fog was lying thickly over the city. It was cold. The air choked with chimney smoke that was pushed back down to the street level by the blanket of fog.
It was early and though the lamps were lit, the light could not penetrate far enough to show Billy the way. He stumbled though the dim streets and into the mine-like alleys that housed bookbinders, printers and pamphleteers' premises.
London in the 1820s was not a place that you normally heard birdsong; you saw pigeons often enough, but melodious chirping was something confined to the edge of the city and the countryside beyond.
But on that morning, among the frosty and smoky air, the dulcet sound of a songbird floated down from a window high about his head. He might not have heard it if not for the hour and the deadening effect of the fog. He stopped and closed his eyes, listening.
It was so delightful, so pure, that he was sure it could not be native to this place. It must be an exotic bird, carried with care by a sailor from a distant land and bought at great cost by a gentleman like Mr Harvell. He opened his eyes and resumed his walk to work but could not stop thinking about it all the way to the printers.
Billy laid out the first prints of the newly completed plates. Perhaps it was brightly coloured like the Carolina parrot he thought gazing down at the vibrant greens, oranges and sunshine yellow before him.
He was still gazing at them when Mr Harvell spoke, making him jump. "Have you found a flaw?" He asked, but his eyes twinkled and the younger man blushed.
"No sir, they are remarkable."
Robert Harvell Jr was a skilled engraver but he could not help a broad smile at the compliment from his earnest young assistant.
"The colourists have done well but I think we can give Mr Audubon 99% of the credit." He leant over Billy and looked down at the parrots. "It is a beautiful creature," he said. "Makes an awful racket though, according to Audubon."
Billy looked up, astonished and Harvell nodded, "I know, when you think of the beautiful song of that ordinary little finch in the alley this morning." He turned away to where the other prints were hanging up to dry overnight. "I suppose that sometimes beauty is in the ear rather than the eye of the beholder."
While Audubon was in Edinburgh in 1826 he found an engraver, William H Lizars, but unfortunately he could not fulfil more than ten plates after his colourists went on strike.
Audubon travelled to London where he engaged noted engraver of animal portraits, Robert Harvell Jr. who engraved, printed and hand coloured each of the 435 individual plates based on Audubon's original paintings. He even finished some of Lizars plates, adding extra details like insects.
In spite of this, Harvell gets barely a mention at the National Museum of Scotland. So of course I was attracted to him and his story.
While Birds of America is a truly epic achievement and worthy of exhibitions and celebrating, I find myself continually drawn back to Audubon the man. I understand that the museum could not focus too heavily on him, as it was the book that the exhibition was about, but he is too much of a character to sideline.
For all his missteps and struggles, his mystery and mastery of his craft, Audubon's legacy is assured. It cost $115,640 (over $2m in today's money) to publish Bird's of America in the 1830s. There are only 120 copies in existence today and in the last twenty years six copies have been sold at auction for an average of $8.2m.
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