It’s a miracle this exhibition even exists: Audubon’s Birds of America reviewed

In 2014, an exhibition of watercolours by the renowned avian artist, John James Audubon, opened in New York. The reviews, from the New York Times to the Guardian, were unambiguously enthusiastic, celebrating the painter as a legendary genius who ‘exceeded the limits of his era’. Fast forward eight years, and a rather different vibe hangs over the latest outing of his bird portraits, one that reflects both the limits of that era and the limits of the man.

Visitors to the National Museum of Scotland’s Audubon’s Birds of America are welcomed with an acknowledgment that the artist was ‘full of contradiction and controversy’. His charge sheet is substantial. It’s not his fault that he was the son of a slave trader, but he did choose to profit from buying and selling enslaved people at a time when the abolition movement was in full swing. That alone might be enough to see him totally cancelled.

Add to this a negligent approach to scientific rigour, a willingness to falsify data or just make up species, a disinclination to credit collaborators and a bloodthirsty enthusiasm for slaughtering his subjects and, frankly, it’s a miracle this exhibition even exists. And we haven’t even started on the romance with phrenology that saw him steal Mexican soldiers’ skulls from a battlefield to pass on to his racist quack chums. Even by the standards of his time, let alone ours, Audubon was a wrong ’un.

Frankly, it’s a miracle this exhibition even exists

Nevertheless, the exhibition is here and for that I suppose we must thank the museum for its unfashionable willingness to disentangle the work from the man, because the art on display remains astounding.