Giving Thanks with John James Audubon's Beloved Turkeys
A turkey isn't the kind of animal that typically evokes strong feelings. Few of us carnivores interact with it unless we’re eating it.
A turkey isn’t the kind of animal that typically evokes strong feelings. Few of us carnivores interact with it unless we’re eating it. And “it” usually means rubbery, ready-to-eat deli meat from the grocery store. Then comes Thanksgiving, a feast for which we lug home a whole bird to demonstrate our gratefulness. The result after several hours of roasting? Dry, non-descript protein — in my house, at least.
The artist-naturalist John James Audubon wasn’t a typical guy, though, and he absolutely loved turkeys. His visiting card bore the likeness of a turkey, and he mailed all his letters with a seal bearing a turkey cock — the male bird, that is. He even owned one as a pet for a while, though it was later shot by a hunter.
This love imbues his 1826 oil painting “Wild Turkey Cock, Hen and Young,” recently acquired by Crystal Bridges Museum and now on view in John James Audubon & the Artist as Naturalist. It was the first of many oil paintings Audubon created to raise money and enroll subscribers for his ornithological masterpiece Birds of America (1827–1838). He based it on two life-size watercolor studies created for the forthcoming volume of lithographs. One featured a hen and her young, the other a male turkey.
In the exhibition brochure, curator Manuela Well-Off-Man explains that Audubon found the latter 28-pound specimen gobbling in a dense thicket of cane near a plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. After bagging the bird, he used wire and thread to suspend it in a life-like pose in his studio, then spent several 14-hour workdays sketching its feathers and muscles before they lost their luster. A student of Audubon’s wife Lucy later recalled, “The damned fellow kept it pinned up there till it rotted and stunk — I hated to lose so much good eating.” By the time the artist integrated the image into “Wild Turkey Cock, Hen and Young,” he was on a promotional tour in Scotland. “I miss my ‘Wild Turkeys,’ on which I worked steadily and from dawn to dark, a long time here, — for sixteen days,” he wrote in his journal.
Audubon clearly intended for the image to endear us to America’s humble fowl. Though best remembered as the animal kingdom’s careful scribe, he let his imagination run free when he painted the turkey family. In the wild, a hen will usually protect her offspring by driving away the cock, whereas the artist depicted the chicks following both their parents closely through a forest. Curator Well-Off-Man observes that this departure from reality shows Audubon’s images were “more than just scientific illustrations. He wanted them to be considered works of art, and he approached them in a romantic manner.” Fittingly, he gave the work to the Royal Institution in Edinburg after they let him exhibit 400 drawings of about 2,000 birds in their gallery free of charge that winter. It was a gesture of gratitude, a gift of thanks.
John James Audubon & the Artist as Naturalist is on view at the Crystal Bridge Museum of American Art (600 Museum Way, Bentonville, Arkansas) until January 5, 2014.
