Volume 3, Number 10 · December 31, 1964
Audubon: The Last Days of Nature
By Eleanor Clark
The Audubon Folio
text by George Dock Jr.
Abrams, 32, 30 plates pp., $25.00
Audubon's Wildlife
by Edwin Way Teale, with selections from the writings of John James Audubon
Viking, 264 pp., $15.00
John James Audubon
by Alice Ford
Oklahoma, 488 pp., $7.95
To take a fresh look at the whole phenomenon of Audubon just now is almost as difficult as it is painful. A single print, even in the best of modern reproductions, as in the lovely folio brought out now by Harry N. Abrams (a selection of thirty from the 435 engravings in the original Birds of America) is hard enough to see straight. The female Broad-winged Hawk spreads one wing to expose the barred and speckled underside, of such a pattern as Cavallini gave to angels' wings balanced by the somber brown mass of the male, wings closed in a point that crosses the spectacular black-on-white stripes of his tail-feathers, and both forms are superbly part of a diagonal composition of which the basic line, upper left to lower right, is from the branch of pig-nut hickory. How has haute couture resisted these designs? The most demure, the pair of Cat Birds, for instance, with their subtle swatch of brick-red at the tail against a sprinkling of ripe and unripe blackberries and as nearly always with the land birds such an elegance of greens in the leaves would make the hit of a Paris season. Not to mention the somewhat operatic Flamingo, or that total wonder of composition, the Carolina Parrots, in a spray of cockleburr: brown sticks, sea-green feathers and heads with the plastic value of seven little nectarines. The question is whether we can really see them, or even remotely get at the man and the world that created them.
Review, 3948 words
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