John James Audubon,

Audubon, John James - (Artist, Fine Art, Lithograph, United States) (1785 – 1851) John James Audubon was born in Santo Domingo (now Haiti), the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and plantation owner and his French mistress. He was raised by his stepmother, Mrs. Audubon, in Nantes, France. He took an interest in birds, nature, drawing, and music at a young age. In 1803, at the age of 18, he was sent to America, to escape conscription into the Emperor Napoleon’s army. He lived on the family-owned estate at Mill Grove, near Philadelphia, where he hunted, studied, and drew birds. This is where he met his wife, Lucy Bakewell. While he lived in Pennsylvania, he conducted the first known bird-banding experiment in North America, by tying strings around the legs of Eastern Phoebes; he learned that the birds returned to the very same nesting sites each year.
Audubon spent more than a decade in business, eventually he traveled down the Ohio River to the frontier in western Kentucky. He set up a dry-goods store in Henderson, Kentucky. He continued to draw birds as a hobby, amassing an impressive portfolio. Audubon and his wife Lucy had two sons Victor Gifford and John Woodhouse, and a daughter who died in infancy. Audubon was quite successful in business for a while, but hard times hit, and in 1819, he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy.
With no other prospects, Audubon set off to depict America’s avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist’s materials, and a young assistant. He floated down the Mississippi river, living a rugged hand-to-mouth existence. Having left his wife and sons behind, Lucy earned money as a tutor to wealthy plantation families. In 1826, he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. "The American Woodsman" was literally an overnight success. His life-size, highly dramatic bird portraits, along with his embellished descriptions of wilderness life, hit just the right note at the height of the Continent’s Romantic era. Audubon found a printer for the Birds of America, first in Edinburgh, then London, and later collaborated with the Scottish ornithologist William MacGillivray on the Ornithological Biographies – life histories of each of the species in the work.
The last print was issued in 1838, by which time Audubon had achieved fame and a modest degree of comfort, traveled this country several more times in search of birds, and settled in New York City. He made one more trip out West in 1843, the basis for his final work of mammals, the Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, which was largely completed by his sons and the text of which was written by his long-time friend, the Lutheran pastor John Bachman (whose daughters married Audubon’s sons). Audubon spent his last years in senility and died at age 65. He is buried in the Trinity Cemetery at 155th Street and Broadway in New York City.