ABOUT JOHN JAMES AUDUBON

He was one of the most remarkable men in early America. A self-taught painter and ornithologist, he pursued a dream that made him famous in his lifetime and left a legacy in art and science that endures to this day. His portrait hangs in the White House and his statue stands over the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History. Yet the story of John James Audubon has never been told on movie screens.

Born in Haiti in 1785, he and his family fled the revolution and moved to Nantes, France in the early 1790s, where he grew up until the age of 18. Seeking refuge from conscription in Napoleon’s army, he emigrated to the fledgling United States, to a farm purchased by his father outside of Philadelphia.

There he met the love of his life, Lucy Bakewell, the daughter of a well-to-do English merchant family. Seeking their fortune, the couple moved upon marriage to the then-frontier of Henderson, Kentucky, where they opened a series of general stores. All the while, Audubon had been fascinated by birds from his youth in France to his time on the American Frontier. When his businesses went bankrupt in the Panic of 1819, Audubon made a daring bet: to paint all of the bird species of America, in life size. It was a project that would take him decades.

In the end, Audubon would paint all 435 then-known species of birds in America (some of them multiple times) on a journey that stretched from the Florida Keys to the straits of Newfoundland to the swamps of Louisiana and Texas to the mountains of Montana and the Dakotas, much of it on foot.