John James Audubon (1785–1851) has always been a problematic hero. In his lifetime, he was attacked as an imposter and braggart, a con man who had neither the artistic nor the scientific credentials to back up the sweeping claims he made about American ornithology. After Audubon’s death, his granddaughter Maria, concerned about her ancestor‘s reputation, scrubbed his prose clean of references to drinking and sexual innuendo and destroyed many of his original journals, replacing them with her own sanitized versions. More recently, Audubon has come under fire again, with some demanding that the Audubon Society consider changing its name. He was never the St. Francis of the American bird world that some fans would like him to be. During four decades of fieldwork, he must have killed thousands of birds.
And that’s not where the problems end. The illegitimate son of a French sea captain and slave trader, Audubon also owned and sold enslaved people, whose share in his work he never acknowledged, although the attentive reader will notice glancing and often appreciative references to wilderness-savvy Black hunters he encountered during his travels in the South. In the eyes of some, Audubon’s racism also spills over into his work, the colonialist presumption that American nature is his to appropriate and turn into art, making it part of a long and painful legacy that has excluded naturalists of color from conversations about American nature. The rumor that he himself might have been Black (and in denial about his own heritage) has proved surprisingly stubborn, given the fact that there’s no supporting genealogical evidence.
Not unexpectedly, the defenders of Audubon have cried foul and worried that such revisionist approaches are intended to “cancel” him. Such worries seem unfounded, though; Audubon has already survived almost two hundred years of negative press, and his scientific and artistic afterlife likely does not depend on whether or not the Audubon Society continues to flaunt his name. In fact, the current critical discussion seems geared to remind us, once again, how complex Audubon is—and how that complexity also shapes his work.