The painter and the muffin man

The celebrated bird artist Audubon collaborated with a Scottish ornithologist who is often unfairly forgotten.

- Ian Morton

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON’S work is unmistakable—large and audacious hand-coloured engravings, iconic portraits of 435 avian species in natural settings and hugely prized. It’s thought that no more than 200 complete sets of his Birds of America were produced—120 are known to be intact and, of these, 107 are owned by institutions and 13 rest in private hands. They rarely come to auction. One set commanded $10.27 million (£8.27m) in 2010, another made $7.92 million (£6.38m) in 2012 and a third $9.65 million (£7.77m) in 2018.

However, the art world barely takes account of the part played in the public launching of Audubon’s project by an Edinburgh engraver and one of Scotland’s finest ornithologists.

Having failed to find an American publisher for his work, Audubon took his first 250 paintings to the Scottish capital, where the respected engraver William Home Lizars was based. Lizars hired 50 colourists, who worked on 10 engravings before going on strike and, although the work was moved to Robert Havell in London, Edinburgh remained the artist’s base for further paintings and the preparation of a book to accompany the engravings.

Of course, the book lacked the glamour of the dramatic portrayals (an original copy was sold in 2010 for a mere $13,750 (£11,070), but Ornithological Biography, which was published separately to sidestep British copyright law, was the result of close collaboration between Audubon and local lecturer, anatomist and ornithologist William MacGillivray, who wrote or rewrote much of it.

In his 1830 journal, Audubon confessed that he was a poor writer and needed help with scientific descriptions and, in the preface to the first volume, declared: ‘I feel pleasure in acknowledging the assistance I have received from a friend, William MacGillivray, in compiling the scientific details and in smoothing down the asperities.’