In just about two weeks, my NEH Summer Institute for Teachers, "Picturing John James Audubon," will begin. For a description of the institute and a preliminary plan of our activities see our website. Audubon was without doubt America's first great artist and nature writer. One aim of the institute will be to recover him as the truly international figure he was--contrary to the many popular readings of him as an exemplary and prototypically American pioneer figure (which are not wrong; they just seem engineered to make us forget what Audubon himself never forgot--that he was a Frenchman by birth, and one born in the Caribbean to boot). Here is the magnificent "White-headed Eagle" from the incomparable set of "Birds of America" owned by the Lilly Library, the location of our institute.
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