AUDUBON'S BUTTERFLIES, MOTHS AND OTHER STUDIES
AUDUBON'S BUTTERFLIES, MOTHS AND OTHER STUDIES
Compiled and edited by Alice Ford
Anyone knowing as little about butterflies as I do about
birds may find Audubon's lepidoptera as attractive as his
bright, active, theatrical birds are to me. Whatever those
birds do, I am with them, heartily sharing, for instance, the
openbilled wonder of "Green Heron" at the fantastic situation
and much too bright colors of "Luna Moth" in a famous picture
of the "Birds" folio. At present, however, I am concerned only
with Audubon's sketchbook ("a fifteen-page pioneer art
rarity" belonging to Mrs. Kirby Chambers of New Castle,
Kentucky) from which Miss Ford has published drawings of
butterflies and other insects in a handsome volume padded with
additional pictorial odds and ends and an account of Audubon's
life. The sketches were made in the 1820s. Most of the
lepidoptera which they burlesque came from Europe (Southern
France, I suggest). Their scientific names, supplied by Mr.
Austin H. Clark, are meticulously correct-- except in the case
of one butterfly, p. 20, top, which is not a Hamaeris
but a distorted Zerynthia. Their English equivalents,
however, reveal some sad editorial blundering: "Cabbage," p.
23, and "Miller," p. 91, should be "Bath White" and "Witch,"
respectively; and the two moths on p. 64 are emphatically not
"Flesh Flies." In an utterly helpless account of the history of
entomological illustration, Miss Ford calls Audubon's era
"scientifi-cally unsophisticated." The unsophistication is all
her own. She might have looked up John Abbot's prodigious
representations of North American lepidoptera, 1797, or the
splendid plates of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century
German lepidopterists, or the rich butterflies that enliven the
flowers and fruit of the old Dutch Masters. She might have
traveled back some thirty-three centuries to the times of
Tuthmosis IV or Amenophis III and, instead of the obvious
scarab, found there frescoes with a marvelous Egyptian
butterfly (subtly combining the pattern of our Painted Lady and
the body of an African ally of the Monarch). I cannot speak
with any authority about the beetles and grasshoppers in the
Sketchbook, but the butterflies are certainly inept. The
exaggerated crenulation of hindwing edges, due to a naive
artist's doing his best to render the dry, rumpled margins of
carelessly spread specimens, is typical of the poorest
entomological figures of earlier centuries and to these figures
Audubon's sketches are curiously close. Query: Can anyone draw
something he knows nothing about? Does there not exist a high
ridge where the mountainside of "scientific" knowledge joins
the opposite slope of "artistic" imagination? If so, Audubon,
the butterfly artist, is at sea level on one side and climbing
the wrong foothill on the other.
The New York Times Book Review,
December 28, 1952.
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