John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ hawk about the streets”—he nonetheless found something positive to say about them: “They are most scrupulously honest. No theft of any kind has ever been charged to them, & their women are most scrupulously chaste.”³¹

      Latrobe was an architect, after all, not an anthropologist, and the point of considering his account here is not its accurate understanding, or even appreciation, of different cultures. Rather, his extensive and inquisitive exploration of New Orleans society, however biased or wrongheaded it may have been, still offers a standard of comparison for Audubon’s own observations, which came just two years later. Audubon seemed considerably less interested and even less impressed; he certainly had less to say about the many textures of society in the city. Where Latrobe spent page after page on his perceptions of different cultures and customs in this remarkably diverse city, Audubon said what he had to say in less than two.

      Like Latrobe, Audubon commented on the energetic scene he found in the Sunday morning market, “crowded by people of all Sorts as well as Colors, the Market, very aboundant, the Church Bells ringing the Billiard Balls knocking … the day was beautifull and the crowd Increased considerably.” But immediately, in the next sentence, Audubon lost interest in the female part of the crowd, saying that “I saw however no handsome Woman and the Citron hue of allmost all is very disgusting to one who Likes the rosy Yankee or English Cheeks.” Later in the day, he did see “some White Ladies and Good Looking ones,” but he begged off going to the “quartroon Ball … as it cost 1$ Entrance I Merely Listened a Short time to the Noise.”³² With that almost offhand expression of disdain toward women of color and apparent indifference to the lively entertainments they could provide, he essentially ceased further discussion of the matter. His failure to look more deeply into New Orleans society in this written account of his initial 1821 visit seems striking, particularly given his later biographical association with the city and its surrounding region. For a man who would eventually even claim, less than fifteen years later, that his father had been “in the habit of visiting frequently … Louisiana” and had “married a lady of Spanish extraction” there, Audubon remained decidedly silent on the multicultural mix of New Orleans.³³ Whatever its energy and diversity, New Orleans never became an especially happy place for Audubon. Poor, separated from his family, facing the unhappy prospect of somehow supporting himself, and always preferring to spend his time and talent on his own art, he spent most of his time there in a funk.

      In the first few weeks, he also spent most of his time looking for work, and he soon found that the world of art didn’t offer much, certainly not in keeping with his artistic self-regard. When he had been in town for five days, he met “an Italian, painter at the Theatre,” who seemed to like his work, but all Audubon could get from the theater management was an insulting offer to “paint with Mons. L’Italian” for a hundred dollars a month. “I believe really now that my talents must be poor or the Country,” he grumbled. The following day he walked through the “Busling City where no one cares a fig for a Man in my Situation” to see John Wesley Jarvis, a local portraitist, but again the meeting amounted to nothing. Jarvis looked at some of Audubon’s bird paintings “but never said they Were good or bad.” When Audubon all but begged him for work as an artistic assistant, being willing to paint clothing and backgrounds and such, Jarvis proved at first evasive and then dismissive: “He very Simply told me he could not believe, that I might help him in the Least.” Over two months later, Audubon finally got an audience with John Vanderlyn, the eminent “Historical Painter,” who said some favorable words about Audubon’s color and composition but ultimately offered only the faintest praise, saying that Audubon’s works seemed “handsomely done”—hardly a forceful endorsement of Audubon’s art. “Are all Men of Talent fools and Rude purposely or Naturally?” Audubon wondered.³⁴

      Audubon’s fellow artists, “Men of Talent” or not, may have seemed nothing more than a source of discouragement, but women—white women in particular—became his artistic bread and butter. Throughout Audubon’s two years in Louisiana, he made ends meet by painting portraits and giving art lessons, quite often for the wives and daughters of prominent men. Early on in his stay in New Orleans, he made a deal with Roman Pamar, a local merchant, to paint Pamar’s three daughters. Audubon wanted twenty-five dollars apiece for head portraits, but Pamar wanted all three girls in one painting, so Audubon raised the rate to a hundred. To prove his skill, Audubon did a quick pencil sketch of one of the girls, Pamar liked what he saw, and he “Civilly told me that I Must do my Best for him and Left it to my self as to the Price.” Several weeks later, Audubon’s biggest and certainly most interesting commission came from a mysterious woman who accosted him on the street, asked him to do her portrait—full-length, and in the nude—and after more than a week of sociable posing, compensated him with the one form of payment Audubon might have preferred to cash, a top-of-the-line gun, worth $120. On another occasion, though, he did a portrait of the wife of a man “who Could Not spare Money” but offered only a woman’s saddle in payment, “a thing I had not the Least use for.” Still, a saddle seemed better than nothing, and with a rueful pun, Audubon concluded that “not to disappoint him I Sufered Myself to be Sadled.” Working on one-off portraits had never been Audubon’s idea of success, but it paid the rent and may even have contributed a bit to Audubon’s personal self-esteem: “Seldom before My coming to New Orleans did I think that I was Looked on so favourably by the fair sex as I Have Discovered Lately.”³⁵

      Making a Living on Lessons

      Audubon’s most promising opportunity came in the summer of 1821, when a wealthy woman, Mrs. Lucy Gray Pirrie, invited him to tutor her teenaged daughter, Eliza, in the necessary arts for a young woman—what Audubon would describe as “Drawing, Music, Dancing, Arithmetick, and Some trifling acquirements such as Working Hair &c”—at the family plantation, Oakley, over a hundred miles upriver from New Orleans, near Bayou Sarah. At first, Audubon figured he had “one hundred Diferent Plans … as Opposite as Could be to this,” but the pay was decent—sixty dollars a month, along with a room in the plantation house for Audubon and his assistant, young Mason—so he took the deal and “found Myself bound for several Months on a Farm in Louisiana.”³⁶

      Oakley was more than just a farm—a commodious house, full of family members and “constant Transient Visitors,” surrounded by extensive grounds and cotton fields, worked by slaves—and Audubon did more than just teach drawing and such. He did his duty as artistic tutor for his “Aimiable Pupil Miss Eliza Pirrie,” but he also spent as much time as he could on his own much-preferred project, “Hunting and Drawing My Cherished Birds of America.” On his way to the plantation in June 1821, he realized how refreshed he felt to be out of New Orleans:

      The Aspect of the Country entirely New to us distracted My Mind from those objects that are the occupation of My Life—the Rich Magnolia covered with its Odiferous Blossoms, The Holy, the Beech, the Tall Yellow Poplar, the Hilly ground, even the Red Clay I Looked at with amasement,—such entire Change in so Short a time, appears, often supernatural, and surrounded Once More by thousands of Warblers & thrushes, I enjoyd Nature.³⁷

      Figure 5. Oakley Plantation House, Audubon State Historic Site, St. Francisville, Louisiana. Photo by Audubon State Historic Site staff.

      During his four months at Oakley, in fact, he wrote very little in his journal about working with Eliza, but page after page about birds: lists of species he had seen or hoped to see, extended descriptions of some of the ones he shot, and, best of all, a couple of accounts of first sightings.

      The good times at Oakley came to an end, however, when Audubon was fired from his position. Eliza had been ill for a month, her doctor had warned against continuing her lessons with Audubon, and Mrs. Pirrie—never an altogether pleasant person, in Audubon’s estimation—dismissed him on October 10, 1821. Seeking just a little more time to continue his ornithological work, Audubon appealed to Mr. Pirrie, a “Man СКАЧАТЬ