John James Audubon, at the root of a new art of nature?

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John James Audubon was an American naturalist painter best known for his monumental work The Birds of America. Published between 1827 and 1838, this collection of 435 ornithological plates features life-size images of various bird species discovered during expeditions through the forests of the United States. At the crossroads of art and science, it depicts a hitherto unknown and elusive fauna and, for its contemporaries, represents an object of scientific innovation as well as of collecting.Today, his name is associated with the most important American organization for the protection of birds: the Audubon Society. However, the naturalist is not unanimously accepted in the life sciences community. If art history celebrates the painter's total immersion in nature, being both its witness and one of its elements, his extremely predatory practice towards fauna is a contrario more and more denounced by environmental history. By sacrificing birds with his gun in order to transcribe them in his drawings, Audubon contributed both to the cultural construction of the wild world and to its real destruction.It is precisely this ambivalence in Audubon's practice and work toward the environment, between empathy and distance, that this paper seeks to interrogate. Audubon defended his work not as a formal copy of nature, but rather as an illustration of his understanding of the diverse individualities that populate the volatile world. Can we speak of a new form of naturalistic art in Audubon? Through an iconographic study of his "Bird Portraits," but also of Audubon's practice, from anthropomorphism to the Romantic theory of physiognomy, we will reflect on naturalist painting as a possible ontological system of thinking and representing nature.