Joseph Mason (artist)

Joseph Mason (1808 – October 8, 1842) was an American artist who worked as an assistant to John James Audubon, painting uncredited plant-life backgrounds for some 50 of his bird studies for the book The Birds of America.

Joseph Mason, who is listed in some sources as Joseph R. Mason, was born in Delaware, Ohio, the son of Joseph Wilson Mason (a bookseller), and later moved to Cincinnati, Ohio.

When Audubon came to Cincinnati for a short time in 1820, Mason became his pupil, showing exceptional talent, especially as a draftsperson. Audubon later wrote in a letter to his wife that Mason had a "fine" talent for painting and "draws flowers better than any man probably in America, thou knowest I do not flatter young artists much, I never said this to him, but I think so". Audubon hired Mason as his assistant to paint the floral backgrounds of his bird pictures as they traveled south down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. A good shot, Mason also undertook other expedition duties, shooting many specimen birds as well as rowing the boat and ferrying supplies.

During the two years he traveled with Audubon (October 1820 to August 1822), Mason painted, by his own reckoning, between 150 and 200 background watercolors for Audubon. Over 50 of these were used, uncredited, in Audubon's book of 450 bird paintings. For example, for Audubon's study of two blue yellow-backed warblers (now known as northern parula birds; plate 15 of Birds of America), Mason painted an image of Iris fulva, the copper iris, which Audubon called Louisiana flag. Similarly, plate 73 shows Mason's painting of a branch of Magnolia grandiflora (southern magnolia, called by Audubon great magnolia) on which is perched a Canada warbler (called by Audubon Bonaparte's flycatching warbler). A former curator of the National Gallery of Art considers that Mason's backgrounds significantly contribute to the scientific worth of Audubon's project because of how they help to establish scale, proportion, and environment.

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