Portrait of John James Audubon by the Scottish artist John Syme, 1826. The White House, Washington D.C. Public domain.

Audubon Draws a Nude

A Commission He Couldn’t Refuse, Part Two

I spent a year at the University of Toronto reading the epic poem Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon. The prof for that class was Laurence K. Shook, a Basilian priest who had a special interest in the riddles contained in an Old English manuscript called the Exeter Book. These riddles all take the form of short poems in alliterative verse, and none of them…