What do you think about John Audubon at the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts?

When I saw the John James Audubon exhibition being held at the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, I immediately felt a sense of contradiction.

Not only was he a great man (he owned slaves), a scientist (some of the birds didn’t exist), or a conservationist (he shot many of the birds he represented), but he was also an artist. It is difficult to defend his reputation as a (some argue) Frederick Church and Thomas Cole were more ardent environmental defenders).

The National Audubon Society, founded in his name in 1905, considered dropping his name in 2023, and some chapters have done so.

I decided to go see if I could come to terms with his strange bird and him.

One of them is the osprey carrying fish, a sight we are privileged to see frequently in the sky. The fish is facing forward and clenched. Osprey does this for aerodynamics. Both creatures have mouths and beaks wide open, expressing the conqueror’s elation and the conqueror’s fear. Stoic expressions may be more realistic, but they are no less interesting.

If you look closely, you can see so much detail that you can almost feel the webs on the bird’s feet. The claw sinks into a small hole in the fish’s flesh and blood drips out. Again, I thought, he’s not sensitive. But after all, what naturalist would not take advantage of all the drama available to attract people to admire their subject?

All of the feathers are rendered with such precision that you can build an osprey from scratch using Audubon’s feather inventory. But my eye kept catching on the asymmetry of the wings. One is arched and horizontal, and the other is a vertical line over the bird’s body. I’m no bird expert, but this osprey must have fallen from the sky. Still, there was no denying that Audubon’s selection was more visually stimulating. His biological fibers allow him to exhibit two realistic wing postures at the same time.

Audubon’s writings reveal that he spent hours observing ospreys, intending to kill them for portraits.

The largest fish I saw this bird pull out of the water was a weak fish like the one pictured on the plate, but large enough to weigh over 5 pounds. The bird struggled to get it into the air, but when it heard reports of shots being fired, it dropped it.

Even though he had a gun, Ansel Adams wrote about photography, “A good photograph is one that perfectly expresses the deepest feeling about what is being photographed.” I thought that this was what Audubon was trying to achieve through his medium.

Audubon’s famous quote is posted on the wall. “I know I’m no scholar, but I don’t think there’s a living person who knows more about the habits of birds than I do.” Audubon’s freedom reflects his ownership of the birds themselves. Sense, suggests a sense of saying something truer than life.

To make the portrait, he attached the dead bird to a board with pins and wire. I thought he would warp these creatures upon death and immortalize their visions. His success in getting people to look at birds in amazement helped establish the brand for the organization, which has saved countless birds for more than 100 years.

Despite his distortions, his portrait is part of the field guide. Audubon combined males and females in the same composition for many species. He often sculpted birds into odd poses showing the underside of one wing and the upper side of the other. Each of his plates includes detailed field notes to identify the birds’ feeding and nesting habits, as well as their characteristics.

This exhibit does not advocate his white supremacy. As with any portraiture, you have to choose what to feature in your exhibition.

I don’t know what will happen yet, but I was grateful to be able to see the big picture up close. Each of his bird portraits was an almost violent collision of love and death, fidelity and fiction, the sublime and the macabre, the virtuoso and the clumsy. Some say that art’s job is to provoke and make us feel, and this exhibition accomplishes that well, both in what it includes and what it excludes.

Hilary Flower is an Everglades researcher, professor at Eckerd College, and member of the Flamingo Working Group.

Please give it a try. “Audubon’s Birds of America” runs through Feb. 16. Also, “Ansel Adams Photography from the MFA Collection” is only available until March 16th, so it’s a double bill for nature lovers.