EARLY DRAWINGS 185 



of life, and because his desire and style compelled him 

 to represent the utmost detail, even to the barbs of a 

 feather or the individual hairs of a mammal. When a 

 landscape was to be included it was not an easy task 

 to harmonize life-sized objects in the foreground with 

 receding objects, and here he sometimes failed. Some 

 of his least happy compositions, however, were the re- 

 sult of haste, as an examination of the originals of his 

 Birds of America has clearly shown; when hard pressed 

 for time he would resort to the scissors and paste, in 

 order to combine the parts of several distinct drawings 

 into one plate, and often leave the backgrounds to be 

 supplied entirely by the engraver. One of the few 

 grotesque results of such methods is seen in plate 141, 

 wherein are represented the Goshawk and the Stanley 

 Hawk; the latter, which was originally designed for 

 different surroundings, has quite lost its center of grav- 

 ity on an islet amid stream. An early reviewer thought 

 that the artist must surely have intended this for a cari- 

 cature, as in the case of one of Hogarth's famous prints, 

 in which a man on a distant hill is lighting his pipe at a 

 candle held out of a window in the foreground. 



The action of Audubon's subjects was sometimes ex- 

 aggerated; his birds on the wing were occasionally ill 

 drawn, and other defects might be mentioned. But we 

 must admire his boldness for attempting so many dif- 

 ficult positions, and admit that, when all is considered, 

 he succeeded to admiration, and set a new standard for 

 the illustration of works on natural history. 



