Audubon

Audubon, John James, a celebrated American naturalist, was born of French Protestant parents in Louisiana in 1781. After studying in Paris, where he learnt drawing under David, he settled on a plantation in Pennsylvania and married; but, having from boyhood a passion for observing and sketching birds, he for many years took long annual journeys in the primeval forests of the interior for this purpose. Between 1830 and 1839 he published in four folio volumes his Birds of America, described by Cuvier as "the most magnificent monument that Art had up to that time raised to Nature," and his American Ornithological Biography, and between 1840 and 1850 devoted himself to similar works on The Quadrupeds of America. He died at New York, 27th January, 1851.