by

Nicki Leone

“. . . with Bewick on my knee, I was then happy”
                                                      —Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour . . .

The book she is reading is Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds, which excited her fantasies in a way that I am sure her guardians would have found rather alarming:

Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.

I have always had a fond affinity for stories of girls who hid away in secret places to read books, and I attached myself at an early age to Jane Eyre, in whom I recognized a kindred spirit. And because I wanted to read whatever she happened to be reading, it was natural that I would I trot down to my neighborhood library and request a copy of A History of British Birds by Thomas Bewick. Alas the library—which until that moment I had assumed held every book in the world—could not help me. They didn’t have a copy. Instead, I was forced to be content with a rather large book with paintings by John James Audubon.

Perhaps every book comes to its reader in its own time. It was thirty years after that fruitless trip to the library that historian Jenny Uglow published a book called Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick. Thirty years—during which I learned, among other things, about birds and about drawing, about books and the making and selling of them. And I discovered in the life of Thomas Bewick, a naturalist, engraver, artist, printmaker and book maker, the same kinship I had felt for the young Jane Eyre, all those years ago.

Opening Nature’s Engraver, the first thing I realized was that I already knew Thomas Bewick. I had seen his engravings and woodcuts in countless books I had read over the years—small vignettes gracing the ends of chapters, decorating the frontispieces of old novels, illustrating the odd memoir or traveler’s diary. I had seen, but obviously never looked, my eyes sliding over the illustrations as mere decorations to the accompanying story.

Jenny Uglow corrected my error immediately. One of the first reproductions she includes in this engaging biography is a small scene (most of Bewick’s woodcuts were small in size, to fit their use in printing) of a man looking at the ruins of an old wall on the edge of a forest. I looked at the picture on the page before I read the text and thought, “very pretty.” And then went on to read Uglow’s description: “Before me was a tiny scene, not a lyrical country lane, but a man pissing against a wall.”

I stopped in shock and looked back at the image. I had thought the man was looking at the wall—looking, perhaps, at an ancient inscription. Now I saw how he, with his back to the viewer, had canted his hips forward, his two hands reaching down out of sight in front of him. There was no inscription to be deciphered. There is a wisp, a suggestion of something falling through the air, and a telltale line arcing downwards from the man’s own shadow on the wall.

What had I thought I was seeing? I had thought, obviously, that eighteenth century woodcut engravers would not waste their efforts carefully drawing a picture of a man peeing on a wall.  I wondered what Jane Eyre would have thought.

That first woodcut illustrates perfectly (not to mention graphically) the rather joyous point that Uglow spends the rest of the biography making—in a comprehensive way over the course of some 400 pages; that nothing was beneath Bewick’s notice. Every moment, every action, was an occasion to be recorded, illustrated, interpreted and remembered. Life seemed endlessly fascinating to the artist. When Bewick created an engraving, even the smallest lines had meaning. In the background of the picture of a horse he draws the kitchen maid flirting with a shepherd, and neglecting the care of the children of the house. In an engraving of two old soldiers who meet upon a road  he includes details of uniform that announce their companies, and implies the battles that cost each a limb. Bewick may draw pictures, but his pictures all tell stories.

Uglow gives the same attention to narrative and fine detail in portraying the life of Thomas Bewick as the man himself devoted to each of his thousands of woodcuts, with equally happy results. The wealth of detail in a lesser writer might result in a rather dense book, but Uglow never forgets that facts are not as important as context. Her biography is highly erudite, but so charmingly written that one hardly notices. Research never gets in the way of story.

Bewick’s childhood was spent in a small village in the Tyne River valley, near Newcastle in the north of England. He was a somewhat wayward boy, preferring to spend his days out in the woods and exploring riverbanks than in a school room. He was often whipped for skipping school, and often beaten for the indifferent attention he paid to his lessons. But it was commonly recognized that he had a talent for drawing and most of the houses in the village had a few hunting sketches drawn right onto their walls by the young boy.

Bewick’s father bowed to the inevitable and apprenticed his son to an engraver in Newcastle, where the young man had to learn to adjust quickly to the bustling life of a small, crowded city. But he prospered, and his obvious talent was much appreciated by his masters. Thomas Bewick had a marked preference for woodcut work—which suited his master Ralph Beilby since it was a common request and brought in hundreds of small commissions. Only the gentry could afford the more expensive copperplate and silver engraving, which Beilby handled himself. But Bewick did the playbills and letterheads and announcement cards of the town tradesmen and developed a sharp eye for human behavior that was equal to his eye for the habits of birds and fauna. After his apprenticeship was completed, Bewick took a year off and traveled—on foot—through northern England and Scotland. He wrote letters but kept no regular diary. But his memories of that year would make their way into his sketches and drawings for the rest of his life.

Nature’s Engraver shows Thomas Bewick as a man of his time—and what a time it was. The late eighteenth century seethed with  intellectual and political revolution. Rationalism contended against spiritualism, the rights of the individual clashed with old prerogatives of society and class. It was a time of scientific and philosophical inquiry, and a time of great scientific progress. Carl Linneus was developing his system for categorizing species. Fossils were being discovered on beaches and in rocky outcrops. The natural world—once considered wild and unknowable—was now seen as a great construct of God’s design, and a thing that could be studied, understood, and even directed by men. Uglow gives us an enticing taste of the fervor and foment of the age through a myriad of small anecdotes. It is as if she were imitating Bewick’s fondness for vingettes and tailpieces; each chapter—indeed, sometimes each page of her biography contains short scenes of small moments in a life that imply great events in the background. As an engraver and printer, Thomas Bewick often designed pamphlets and bills for local philosophical societies and debating clubs, and was thus in the thick of the intellectual discourse of the era. His own endless curiosity and observation was nurtured in this atmosphere of scientific inquiry. He was often dissatisfied by the available books and texts on natural history—they were frequently poorly illustrated. So it was perhaps not so strange that he would undertake to create a great catalog of the beasts and birds of the world.

A History of British Birds that Jane read so assiduously was Bewick’s greatest accomplishment, and represented a milestone not only in the art of woodcut engraving but also in the study of natural history. His aim was to create a volume that included every known species of bird in the British Isles. And unlike earlier attempts by lesser artists, Bewick was determined that his illustrations would be scientifically accurate, so that a person looking at his pictures might then recognize the bird when he later viewed it in a field or wood. Bewick was also among the first illustrators to situate his subjects in their natural habitat, and to provide clues and hints about their behavior and eating habits in his drawings. The illustrations may well have fascinated a lonely little girl like Jane Eyre, but A History of British Birds was a scientific endeavor of the first order.

It was not, however, natural history as we understand it today. It was not even a nature study as we are inclined to think of the subject now—where an artist or photographer sits quietly with camera, sketchbook and pencil, endeavoring to become invisible to his subjects and watch their behavior un-impeded, untouched, even unsullied by contact with man. This was eighteenth-century science, where a naturalist took careful notes of the habits of the creature he was studying, and then shot it, stuffed it, and brought it back to be dissected and examined in the dark halls of some scientific institute. A History of British Birds was a life-long endeavor, divided into two volumes: Land Birds and Water Birds. But few of the engravings came from drawings made in situ. Instead, for some fifteen years Thomas Bewick’s work table was littered with specimens of birds sent to him by local gentry and correspondents from further afield. (His wife—he managed to marry—was a saint) The dead creatures were piled upon his table, with only small spaces left clear for him to work—by guttering candle late at night, after other commissions had been completed—as he attempted to sketch a living creature from the mass of still wings, beaks and feathers in front of him.

So it is remarkable how alive his subjects appear. “In the finished woodcuts,” writes Uglow, “Bewick managed to convey precisely the characteristics of the species, while apparently showing an individual, living bird . . . often too, the cuts hint at the birds’ relationship with men, like the rooks wheeling over an old house with a scarecrow in the field, or the blue tit eyeing the cottage orchard.” And one need only look at the cuts themselves—the author provides many of them, full-size—to agree. Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds became an instant classic, and remained the single most important reference work for British birders for the next one hundred years.

In 1827, when Thomas Bewick was seventy-four, he received a visitor. At this point in his life, Bewick was internationally famous and widely regarded as the greatest illustrator of the natural world that ever lived. The visitor was a young man, an American, who was an admirer, and was also coincidentally in England looking for a publisher for his own work on birds. In a letter he described the elderly Bewick as “a tall, stout man with a large head” and he was much taken with Bewick’s rather eccentric habits of dress:

Now and then he would take off his cap, and draw up his grey worsted stockings to cover his nether clothes; but whenever our conversation became animated, the replaced cap was left sticking as if by magic to the hind part of his head, the neglected hose resumed their downward journey, his fine eyes sparkled, and he delivered his sentiments with a freedom and vivacity which afforded me great pleasure.

The young man had, perhaps, to be polite and generous. He was trying to raise his fortunes as an illustrator and Bewick was certainly one of the first men in the profession. History does not record if anything came of the meeting beyond a general approbation between the two men, but it is fitting that towards the end of his life Thomas Bewick, the illustrious creator of A History of British Birds, the most important book of birds ever published, almost lost his cap in an excited conversation with John James Audubon, who would soon publish Birds of America—still considered to be the greatest picture book ever produced.

But it is, perhaps, stretching a point to call John James Audubon a “young man” when he first paid a visit to the elderly and respected Thomas Bewick on a chilly spring evening at his home in Newcastle-on-Tyne. Bewick was a hale and hearty seventy-four, but Audubon himself was no teenager. At this point in his life he was old enough to have married, had two children, started and failed at several businesses, conceived of and pursued a natural history project on a grand scale, earned the enmity of peers and colleagues on this side of the Atlantic for his brash arrogance, and put together a portfolio of some 250 drawings and watercolors of species of American birds. He was forty-two years old, about the same age as I am as I write this, and quite obviously he had managed to do much more with his life than I have by this point.

The name of Audubon was fairly common in my household growing up. There was a major road in Buffalo where we lived called the John James Audubon Parkway. We usually had Audubon Society newsletters, calendars and cards around the house. We had a book of reproductions of his paintings and it wouldn’t be exaggerating too much to say that Audubon was the first artist whose work I learned to identify by style—with the possible exception of Dr. Seuss.

At my grandparents house there was a large picture over the fireplace of two American Bitterns that my mother always referred to as “the Audubon print.” As a child, I never gave too much thought to what that meant—to myself, my brother and sister, and all my cousins, it was just one of those iconic pieces that would forever be associated with my grandparents—along with a lamp in the study with a shade that had a train on it that seemed to run along a track and smoke when you turned on the light, and a tall wooden pepper mill that always sat in the kitchen window that we children loved because it was shaped like a smug cat, and a deck of cards for the game “Concentration” that portrayed dozens of different species of birds. I grew up, as must be obvious, in an environmentally-minded family where bird watching was more common than football and one of the more reasonable ways to spend an afternoon was to walk in the woods and attempt to identify all the plants, birds and animals that we saw. It is a family joke that my grandfather—who was a great traveler and a fine photographer—would return from trips to exotic places with hundreds of pictures (mostly slides) of individual plants and birds. There is an entire carousel in my mother’s store room filled with the slides grandpa took of their visit to Switzerland and there is not a single mountain in any of the pictures.

All of which is to say that if my family were to have a patron saint, it might well have been John James Audubon. It wasn’t until I was about the age of Audubon himself when he first knocked on Thomas Bewick’s door that I began to realize just how much I had taken his work for granted.

When my grandparents died their house was put on the market by the family, and all the items in sold off at an estate sale. My mother, anxious to preserve as many memories as possible, kept back a roomful of things that she set up in our house. We called it “the Stauffer Museum” and everyone in the family was invited to take a tour and lay claim to any items they wanted, or that held particular fond memories. Mom also kept the picture of the American Bitterns. “I think it is a real print,” she insisted. But no one in the family seemed to want to deal with a dingy picture that was yellowed from living for fifty years over a working fireplace. “I’ll take it,” I said, “and see if I can get it cleaned up.”

It would be several more years before I found myself in a position to make good on this promise. But finally one summer my parents came south to visit, and they brought what we had started calling “the Audubon.”

It was larger than I remembered. Still in the same frame it had lived in since my grandmother had bought it, the picture measured at least 26 inches high and over 35 inches wide. Dad hung it for me on the wall and we all stared at it and remembered past family gatherings at my grandparents’ old house. “Let me know what it costs to clean it,” said my mother. “I think it might be valuable.”

I’m sorry to say that these words still didn’t make much an impression on me, or at least, not as much an impression as the memories of holidays spent by the fire under that print talking to grandpa about birds and rocks and trees. But the next week I dutifully called up my friend Merrimon Kennedy—who owned her own art gallery and who was the only person I could think of who might be able to tell me how to go about authenticating, appraising, and restoring the print. Merrimon sighed when I called her. “Lots of people think they have an Audubon” she said, “but these things almost always turn out to be reproductions.” I told her that might be the case, but I’d promised the family I’d look into it. So Merrimon—who would become my guide through the process of evaluating artwork—gave me the name of an appraiser who specialized in all things Audubon.

I did a bit of research online before I dared to call him. I discovered that the term “Original Audubon Print” can mean many things but in the collector’s world of art and rare books it referred to one of the hand-colored prints produced for the first “Double Elephant” (so named for the large size of the paper used) edition of Birds in America, published in between 1827-1838, engraved by Robert Havell, Jr. and sometimes called “the Havell edition” as a result. There were 435 numbered plates, showing 1065 birds from 489 different species, meant to be bound in four volumes, and about 240 copies were produced, most of which have long since been broken up. There have other editions and reproductions since then—indeed, hundreds and thousands of them—but it is this first edition that is meant when collectors talk about an “original Audubon.”

I checked the things that could be checked without daring to take down the print or attempt to remove it from its frame, and started, frankly, to get the willies. The size was right for an untrimmed original. I could see Havell’s name inked at the bottom right corner. The paper looked old. I could see the lines where the press had come down with enormous pressure to make the print from the copper plate. I took a look at what Havell prints were going for on the market and gulped. Then I called the appraiser.

“I think I might have an original Audubon print,” I told the man on the phone. There was a moment of silence. “It’s very unlikely,” he said. “The most common call I get is from a person who thinks they found an Audubon in their attic—but they are almost always reproductions.” I said that I understood, and I didn’t want to waste his time, but I’d gone as far as I could in identifying it and I needed a better-informed opinion. He asked which print it was and I told him about the American Bitterns. “How big is it?” he queried, and I told him. There was another silence. “Hmm,” he said. I told him that I could see the impression of the plate on the paper. “Hmmmm,” he said again, sounding more interested.

But when he came and saw the picture on the wall, his face broke out into a purely spontaneous smile. “Oh!” he exclaimed, “oh, this is exciting!” I told him I was afraid to take it down and afraid to even attempt to take it out of the frame. Together we spread a clean white cotton sheet on the floor and carefully lifted the frame down—much more carefully, I’ll admit, than it had been hung. The appraiser teased the old cardboard backing away from the frame, and the wood—dry and brittle and still bearing the name of the antique shop that had originally sold my grandparents the picture—came away in pieces. We then lifted away the glass, and had a heart-stopping moment when it, also brittle and aged, cracked into pieces as we lifted it away from the print. Then the appraiser donned a pair of white cotton gloves and, kneeling on the floor, started to examine the paper. His grin got wider and wider.

“This is wonderful!” he kept saying. “This is gorgeous!” He pointed out some of the fine details I had never noticed. “Because these prints were all hand-colored, every one of them contains small flaws.” His finger tapped a spot where the coloring didn’t quite stay within the lines on a blade of grass, and another where a drop of green had spattered onto the background. “You can see the watermark here.” He carefully held up one corner of the paper so light shone through, outlining the faint impression of a “W” (for “J. Whatman”). “These colors are beautiful,” said the appraiser. “You are so lucky to have this.” He wrote out a document that valued the print at something about three times what I had ever paid for a car, and I started feeling faint again. “It’s worth restoring,” he told me earnestly. “The paper is still in pretty good condition even though it has been sitting above a fireplace for half a century. I think you could get it cleaned and brighten it up a lot.”

The next day I took a deep breath and called Merrimon back. “Do you know anyone who cleans Audubon prints?” I asked. “It was real?” she exclaimed delightedly. I told her how happy my picture had made her friend the appraiser. Merrimon found me a reputable art restorer who specialized in prints and had handled Audubon prints in the past. She lived five hours away, so one day by appointment I packed the now somewhat awe-inspiring picture flat between two large pieces of cardboard and drove it to her studio. (The idea of attempting to ship it made me feel faint). There, in an airy and immaculate apartment with shiny varnished hardwood floors and wide, clean tables, we laid out American Bitterns (plate number 337) under a bright light while I was treated to another tour of a picture I was beginning to realize I didn’t know at all.

“This is lovely” said the restorer, “let me show you some of the flaws I see, and what I think can be done.” She pointed out a water stain on the left edge she said would fade but not disappear.  She noted a few scraped areas on the edges that had obviously been treated at some point. “But you are lucky,” she said, “the coloring is well-preserved. I’m so glad there isn’t any red, “she added. “Those are the hardest to restore. All the other colors set well and become fixed over time, but the reds and pinks stay water-soluble and are very hard to clean or treat.” She pointed to the shiny yellow eye of the male bittern. “They used a kind of clear yellow rosin on the eye to make it look bright and alive.” I hadn’t noticed.

She told me that to clean the print of all the acidic dirt which had accumulated from its life in less-than-museum-quality conditions, she would float the print on top of a bath of ionized water, allowing the dirt and impurities to leech out of the paper and fall away. “You are going put it in water?” I exclaimed, shocked. She was indeed, several times in fact. She thought it would take four or five baths, with drying periods in between in bright, indirect light, to leech out all the impurities. By washing the print, she would also be de-acidifying it, halting any damage made by acidic breakdown of the paper’s fibers.

American Bitterns lived with the restoration expert for the next five months while I breathed a sigh of relief that someone else was now responsible for this extraordinary thing that had come into my life.  It had become impressed upon me that when I blithely told my mother I would “take care of the print” I hadn’t simply agreed to look after a nostalgic piece of family memory. No, I was now in charge of A Piece of History, and that it was up to me to keep my charge safe and secure, not just for my family, but for anyone and everyone who valued John James Audubon and his achievements.

My American Bitterns print is a piece of what many consider to be the most important picture book and book of natural history ever produced. Birds of America was, at the time, a publishing project on a massive scale. Audubon’s great ambition was to produce a book that would portray vivid, life-sized portraits of every single known species of bird on the American continent. In order to do this, Audubon had to do his sketches on paper sized to fit the largest copper plates engravers were able to use at the time—a full 26 x 39 inches. Larger birds, such as eagles and the famous flamingo, were contorted to fit within the bounds allowed by the plate.

Audubon’s stated aim was to produce a work of natural history, a reference that would be scientifically accurate in its detail, with backgrounds that would set each species in its familiar terrain or with trees or plants that were important to it for food or shelter. But he also wished to create images that were alive, and animated. It was the standard practice of ornithologists to make drawings from stuffed specimens, usually in profile. Audubon was dissatisfied with this approach, finding the end result accurate but lifeless, uninteresting.

The early nineteenth century was an era of scientific progress, and one that did not draw too fine a distinction between “art” and “science” and Audubon considered himself to be both. Indeed, his powers of observation as a scientist may have been more pronounced in the beginning than his skill as an artist, for he was frequently dissatisfied with his attempt to draw his birds in situ. Absent the advantages we enjoy of being able to photograph birds in their environment, Audubon, like most naturalists, had to work primarily from specimens that were shot and brought to his study. Nor was he a conservationist by nature—he had the eighteenth century progressive man’s drive to catalog and record, but not to preserve, and was known to shoot a hundred birds to get one which was in good enough condition to draw.

But piles of dead birds on his table were still “lifeless” and the animation Audubon so desired still eluded him, until one day he hit upon the idea of posing the carcasses against a grid.  My two bitterns were probably pierced in several places by thin strong wire, which were then embedded on a board of soft wood outlined with a grid.  He used this frame to pose the birds upright and stalking through the marsh grass, frozen in a parody of action, and then caught forever by Audubon’s pencil and brush.

John James Audubon didn’t travel to England at the age of 40 simply to meet the other most famous illustrator of birds in the Western world; he was also looking for an engraver who could turn his watercolors into prints. This meant that his pictures had to be traced onto a large copper plate, then carefully engraved with the use of a fine needle called a burin, and etched in series of treatments with acid called “intaglio printing” using strong acids to incise fine lines and a more difficult process called aquatint (it has nothing to do with water) that could produce shading and tonality. There was no one in America at the time with the skill for such as large and complicated project, so Audubon naturally came to London. There he found Robert Havell Sr., who at the time was estranged from a son he hoped would follow him in the business. Havell knew immediately that Audubon’s paintings would require more skill than his shop possessed, and searched for an engraver with talent equal to the task. He finally found a printer whose work seemed to show the kind of skill needed, and enquired from the printer if he could hire the engraver responsible for the fine work. The engraver, it turned out, was Havell’s missing son.

The partnership between John James Audubon and Robert Havell (Jr.) must be counted as one of the great artistic collaborations of all time. Audubon would forward Havell life-sized “drawings” (he used the term to apply to all of his pictures, even when he used watercolors or soft colored crayons), each piece heavily annotated with details of coloring, markings, patterns, background etc. It is likely Havell himself did the actual transfer of the Audubon’s work onto the plates and the engraving. He was a master at aquatint, and the many fine lines in American Bittern speak to his master draughtsmanship. Indeed, looking at American Bitterns and knowing now something of the process it took to create the image, the detail is breathtaking. Once a print had been done, it was turned over to a small army of about fifty colorists. The most experienced handled the coloring of the birds, while others were entrusted to the backgrounds. Havell himself produced the formula for the colors on consultation with Audubon, and created the pattern by which his apprentices worked. It was this assembly-line kind of production that ensured a remarkable uniformity among the prints, although as my appraiser had pointed out, some flaws did occur.

It took some fifteen years of traveling, drawing and exploring for John James Audubon to have a large enough portfolio to sell a printer on the idea of his project. More to the point, it took that much time to produce a portfolio fine enough to convince wealthy British gentleman to subscribe to the project—in effect paying in advance for their copies. It took another fifteen years for Audubon to finish the last drawing, and Havell to finish the last plate. But it was worth every hour of toil. In the entire world there wasn’t a book equal to Birds of America. A full set of bound prints weighed up to 200 pounds. Birds of America stands still today as the pinnacle of the engraver’s art, of the naturalist’s thirst for knowledge, of the painter’s commitment to glorious detail, of a scientist’s joy of discovery.

I realized that my little piece of it hanging now in my living room, framed in acid-free matting behind UV-protected glass wasn’t mine at all. It wasn’t even my family’s. American Bitterns, no. 337, belongs to history. I am simply keeping it for awhile.

Editor’s Note: On December 7, 2010, a rare first edition of The Birds of America (1827-38) sold for $11.5 million, the most ever paid for a printed book at auction. (Its original estimate had been $6.3-$9.4 million.) By comparison, a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio seemed a bargain at $2.3 million.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Birds of America by James John Audubon
A History of British Birds by Thomas Bewick (Kessinger Publishing)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (Penguin Classics, 2010)
Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this with the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.