Golden Eagle (Falco Chrysaetos), Volume 2, Plate 181
Painted February 1833. The watercolor showed a diminutive figure with an eagle strapped to its back descending the log in the left–hand corner. The leather-clad hunter is widely assumed to be Audubon’s self–portrait; there is a certain irony to the fact that the hunter might have killed the young eagle for whose benefit the female portrayed in the plate has killed the hare.
The plate shows a female Golden Eagle straining to ascend with its prey, a northern hare in its winter coat. One of eagle’s claws has penetrated the hare’s eye. The empty log in the left bottom corner offers an ironic parallel to the bird’s upward rise. The snow-clad mountaintops echo the rabbit’s fur-a reminder that this eagle transcends even the world of mountains, taking a piece of the landscape with her. Audubon’s essay on the Golden Eagle is the darkest in the entire collection; it focuses less on the bird’s natural history than on the bungled process by which Audubon killed the animal (a male Golden Eagle Audubon had purchased in Boston in February 1833) and on how killing the bird affected him. Painting the bird took fourteen days and nearly “cost me my life.” The text unfolds a voyeuristic drama in which the naturalist looks at the captive Golden Eagle as he is trying to asphyxiate him with charcoal fumes while the latter looks back at him, undaunted. The painting makes the bird come alive again, though as a female-as a powerfully, semi-divine figure, rising over the mountaintops, in deliberate allusion to Jacques-Louis David’s famous portrait of Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801). Audubon had occasionally claimed-incorrectly-that he had been David’s student.
From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography
[The Golden Eagle] was removed in his prison into a very small room, and closely covered with blankets, into which was introduced a pan of lighted charcoal, when the windows and door were fastened, and the blankets tucked in beneath the cage. I waited, expecting every moment to hear him fall down from his perch; but after listening for hours, I opened the door, raised the blankets, and peeped under them amidst a mass of suffocating fumes. There stood the Eagle on his perch, with his bright unflinching eye turned towards me, and as lively and vigorous as ever! … Early next morning I tried the charcoal anew, adding to it a quantity of sulphur, but we were nearly driven from our home in a few hours by the stifling vapours, while the noble bird continued to stand erect, and to look defiance at us whenever we approached his post of martyrdom. His fierce demeanour precluded all internal application, and at last I was compelled to resort to a method always used as the last expedient, and a most effectual one. I thrust a long pointed piece of steel through his heart, when my proud prisoner instantly fell dead, without even ruffling a feather.