Word: audubon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JOHN JAMES AUDUBON by Alice Ford. 488 pages. University of Oklahoma...
...Frenchman who became the world's most celebrated delineator of birds was himself a bird of paradox. His name, until he anglicized it, was Jean Jacques Audubon. His adopted home was the U.S. And his natural habitat, proclaimed in assuming an additional name, was "Laforest." But a major part of his time was spent in courtrooms eluding creditors, in Europe's royal courts soliciting patronage, and in scientific academies quarreling with competitors...
Alternately driven and dreaming, irresponsible and ingratiating, mean-spirited and maudlin, Audubon was inevitably misunderstood by contemporaries and, maintains Biographer Alice Ford, "errantly idealized" by her dozen-odd predecessors. As an antidote, Author Ford has presented, in rather stilted fashion, back-to-back facts that usefully clear away the web of fabrication that the Audubon family did their best to spin...
...selection committee has made exceptions to include a few foreign paintings of U.S. subjects and U.S. paintings of foreign subjects. The James McNeill Whistler oil of London's waterfront was chosen because it is a great Whistler. Scottish Painter John Syme's oil of John James Audubon was purchased because it is a fine portrait. An early acquisition was a pencil-and-sepia drawing, The Apotheosis of Franklin, by the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard...
...Birds. Alfred Hitchcock hates birds and the Audubon Society hates Alfred Hitchcock...