Blue Jay (Corvus cristatus), Volume 2, Plate 102
The painting was done in 1825. The trumpet-flower vine in the background, outlined in pencil only, was unfinished. Audubon instructed Havell to copy it from plate 65 (The Rathbone Warbler).
One of Audubon’s most humorous plates. Arranging the three birds (a larger male and two smaller females) in different positions around the trunk of the tree, Audubon gives the viewer a scientifically complete image of the species from different angles. But he also engages in some dark comedy, showing the bird on the left with her beak stuck in an egg as if she were inflating a balloon. Looking at the viewer while she is doing that suggests that she is putting on a performance. Meanwhile, the female on top seems to be wasting the contents of another egg, were it not for the adult below catching and swallowing the oozing yolk. Ultimately, this composition serves a less scientific purpose, then: it allows Audubon to prove his view of the incorrigible mischievousness of these birds and to display another side of his artistic talent-that of the satirist. The plate offers a parody of domesticity: eggs are being destroyed, not tended to. The accompanying essay recounts one of the craziest episodes of Audubon’s life-his failed attempt to import 25 Blue Jays to England to let them loose in the woods.
From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography
Reader, look at the plate in which are represented three individuals of this beautiful species,–rogues though they be, and thieves, as I would call them, were it fit for me to pass judgment on their actions. See how each is enjoying the fruits of his knavery, sucking the egg which he has pilfered from the nest of some innocent dove or harmless partridge! Who could imagine that a form so graceful, arrayed by nature in a garb so resplendent, should harbour so much mischief;-that selfishness, duplicity, and malice should form the moral accompaniments of so much physical perfection! Yet so it is, and how like beings of a much higher order, are these gay deceivers! Aye, I could write you a whole chapter on this subject, were not my task of a different nature. … While at Louisville, in Kentucky, in the winter of 1830, I purchased twenty-five of these birds, at the rate of 6 1/4 cents each, which I shipped to New Orleans, and afterwards to Liverpool, with the view of turning them out in the English woods. They were caught in common traps, baited with maize, and were brought to me one after another as soon as secured. … They bore the passage to Europe pretty well, and most of them reached Liverpool in good health; but a few days after their arrival, a disease occasioned by insects adhering to every part of their body, made such progress that some died every day. Many remedies were tried in vain, and only one individual reached London. The insects had so multiplied on it, that I immersed it in an infusion of tobacco, which, however, killed it in a few hours.