174 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
strenuously, and I thought I had improved by apply- 
ing coats of water-color under the pastels, thereby pre- 
venting the appearance of the paper, that in some in- 
stances marred my best productions. I discovered also 
many imperfections in my earlier drawings, and formed 
the resolution to redraw the whole of them.” Seldom 
satisfied with the results attained, he kept up this labori- 
ous process of revision and selection by which he ap- 
proached more closely to his ideal, the truth of living na- 
ture, for more than forty years, until, in fact, the last 
plates of his Birds of America came from the press in 
England in 1838. An examination of the originals of 
those plates today * proves that many of their defects 
were inevitably caused by the makeshifts to which he 
was sometimes forced by lack of time. 
Audubon has credited his father with the only judi- 
cious criticism which he ever received at the youthful 
stage of his art. “He was so kind to me,” said the son, 
“that to have listened lightly to his words would have 
been highly ungrateful. I listened less to others and 
more to him, and his words became my law.” When he 
was about seventeen years old, or probably not far 
from the year 1802,” he was sent to Paris to study draw- 
ing under Jacques Louis David, the acknowledged 
leader of French art during the period of the Revolu- 
tion. This popular artist, who had uttered fierce invec- 
tives against “the last five despots of France,” became 
nevertheless court painter under Napoleon; like 
many another Conventional regicide, he was destined 
+See Vol. I, p. 185. 
?Cuvier stated in his report on Audubon’s Birds, delivered at the 
Academy of Sciences, Paris, September 22, 1828, that the author had been 
twenty-five years before a pupil in the school of David. This would 
place the date in 1803, but earlier than the autumn of that year, when 
Audubon started for America. See Note, Vol. I, p. 99. 
