How much formal training as an artist did Audubon have?
Audubon’s childhood was disrupted by revolution, first in Haiti, where he was born in 1785 (his mother died within a few months of his birth), then in Nantes, France, where he returned with his father in 1791 when he was six (his father’s wife, Anne Moynet, who had been an older widow when his father married her, welcomed the boy and adopted him). Young Audubon’s schooling was interrupted by the civil disorder of the Revolution, when France’s school system collapsed. (Anne Moynet wrote to young Audubon’s father during this period, “He is the handsomest boy in France–but perhaps not the most studious.”) But he continued to learn at home. His father taught him natural history on long walks together into the woods and marshes along the Loire River below Nantes, and he also learned how to observe and dissect birds from a ship’s surgeon and naturalist who was a family friend and who became an important mentor, Dr. Charles-Marie D’Orbigny. How much art training Audubon received isn’t known.
