by Joy M. Kiser
Princeton Architectural Press, 2012
Genevieve Jones was ahead of her time. Born in 1847 in Circleville, Ohio, into a tight-knit and nurturing family, she grew up observing the natural world with her father, Nelson, and her brother, Howard. Homeschooled through high school and beyond, she excelled at science, math, languages, music, sewing, and art – seemingly everything she was exposed to. She never went to college, but Howard bought her duplicate copies of his college textbooks and she studied them at home, eventually surpassing her brother in chemistry, calculus, and classical poetry.
From an early age, Gennie identified gaps in the existing ornithological literature. Specifically, she saw no worthy counterpart to John James Audubon’s iconic Birds of America (published in installments between 1826 and 1838) for nests and eggs. In her late twenties, she became despondent because of a forbidden marriage, and Nelson encouraged her to undertake a book of her own. He became her patron, organized the publishing and funding of the book, and even built an addition on their home so she and her collaborator, Eliza Shulze, could work. The plan was to issue the book in installments, and to cover all 130 of Ohio’s nesting bird species, with nests and eggs in hand-painted lithographs.
Rutherford B. Hayes and Theodore Roosevelt were among the early subscribers to Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, whose first installment drew astonished praise. Yet after completing just five illustrations, Gennie contracted typhoid fever and died within three weeks. Her family took up the book, with her mother, Virginia, completing most of the remaining nests. Joy Kiser’s book reproduces the 118 lithographs from the book in their original size: a luxurious 11-by-13-inch folio.
The illustrations are gorgeous. I love how bird nests draw order and beauty out of items that on their own seem disorganized and cast off: dead grass, discarded bits of twine, mud, stray horse hairs. Gennie’s and Eliza’s lithographs beautifully capture the textural details of these materials and the nest structures, so that viewing the 16 nests they illustrated feels very much like encountering them in nature. Gennie placed an indigo bunting nest in an elderberry bush, painstakingly rendering not only split cornhusks and cobwebs, but also the thick-stemmed, large-leaved elderberry itself in its ungainly, insect-grazed glory.
It’s fascinating to see Gennie’s and Eliza’s nests, imagining the two young women excited about the vast project ahead of them, and then transition into Virginia’s work. Kiser notes that before Gennie’s death, Virginia did not consider herself an artist and her previous work showed “a simplistic depiction of flowers and scenery that makes no attempt to convey the underlying structures and systems.” Her nests are amazingly lovely, though unnecessarily ornate leaves and flowers in the early ones reflect her previous artistic outlet: painting china. Later, though, Virginia’s illustrations develop the same bold, complex qualities as her daughter’s, and it is virtually impossible to tell them apart.
I couldn’t help but wonder how Gennie would have fared if she had gone to college. She would have matriculated around 1865, just after the Civil War, when very few women’s colleges existed. Gennie’s family ensured that she had every opportunity to develop academically, but how would a new environment, with its rich network of connections and possibilities, have altered her course (and maybe kept her out of Circleville’s typhoid outbreak)?
Joy Kiser has produced an exceptional book whose only down side is its uninformative, incorrect title. America’s Other Audubon does not indicate that an unparalleled nest reference lies within, or that this exceptional work resulted from at least eight peoples’ efforts. Nor does the title reflect the Jones family’s wholehearted odyssey to produce something truly remarkable. Still, this is an easy flaw to forgive once you open the book. Each lithograph is presented alongside text, written by the artist or Howard, which ranges from the refreshingly descriptive (Gennie) to Victorian-flowery and anthropomorphic (Virginia). Kiser includes an informative 20-page introduction, and Howard’s key to the eggs of each featured bird species. I can’t imagine any naturalist not treasuring this book, which at $45, costs less in real dollars than it sold for at its 1886 publication. It truly is a bargain of the century.