The New-York Historical Society is big on illegitimate sons from the West Indies. First the society gave us a show on Alexander Hamilton, born in 1757 on Nevis, the illegitimate son of a French Huguenot mother and a Scots father. Now we have Jean-Jacques Fougere Audubon, born 28 years after Hamilton, in Santo Domingo, the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and a French chambermaid. (The old saw that Audubon’s mother was Creole appears to be untrue.)

Audubon’s mother died while he was still in his infancy. In 1791 Captain Audubon sent his son to France. The captain and his legal wife, who had no children of their own, adopted the boy. These indulgent parents encouraged his artistic aspirations. (Audubon claimed he had studied under David, though this has not been proved.) At 18, Audubon moved to the United States to manage a farm his father owned outside of Philadelphia. There he met and married Lucy Bakewell. For the next several years, John-James Audubon, as he was now known, entered into several abortive business enterprises, alone and in partnerships, in New York, Louisville, New Orleans, and elsewhere. By 1819 he was bankrupt, and even went to debtors’ jail.

All throughout his singularly woeful career in business, Audubon sketched and painted and studied birds. Indeed, it seems his interest in birds diverted his attention from business. When he went bankrupt, he decided to try to make a profession of his bird fascination. He took painting lessons from Thomas Sully, took trips to collect bird specimens, then studied and wrote scholarly papers about them. In 1820 Audubon first dreamt of preparing a massive folio on American birds. He floated the idea but had no luck finding an American backer. He found the support he needed in Britain, where he went in 1826. There he befriended Sir Walter Scott, and, in London, met Robert Havell Jr., the engraver with whom Audubon worked on the four-volume elephant folio “Birds of America” that they produced between 1827 and 1838.

The New-York Historical Society has now presented us with “Audubon’s Aviary,” a show, curated by Roberta J.M. Olson, of some 40 original Audubon preparatory watercolors for “Birds of America.” The society possesses the largest collection of Audubon materials in the world, including the preparatory watercolors for 433 of the 435 plates in “Birds of America.” (Lucy Bakewell Aububon, in financial hardship after her husband’s death, sold the watercolors to the New-York Historical Society in 1863; the missing two are not known to be extant.) Each of these fragile works can be displayed only once every 10 years. That means that if you don’t get to the society by March 27, you’ll have to wait a very long time to see these sumptuous pictures. The exhibition also includes a novelty: Bird song is piped into the gallery, appropriate given Audubon’s interest in the subject and want of means for recording what he heard.

These pictures beg the question: They are clearly naturalistic or scientific illustration (albeit clearly of a very pleasing order), but are they also art? The pictures impress us with their inventiveness, though Audubon often employed other artists to paint in the background details of the pictures, while Audubon himself created the foreground birds. The backgrounds vary tremendously not just in content but in technique, from the Frederic Church-like tropical hyper detail of the 1832 “Lesser Yellowlegs” to simple dramatic strokes of blue to represent the sea in the “Leach’s Storm-Petrel” (painted after 1831). The foreground birds vary as much, however, which confounded some of Audubon’s critics.

Sometimes the birds fly; sometimes they are dead-still (and dead as Audubon depicted them). Sometimes they are shown for optimal scientific scrutiny (the “Loggerhead Shrike,” c. 1825), but just as often in artfully composed and veiled two-shots (the “Anhinga” of 1822). Often there is the drama of the vignette, as in the marvelous “House Wrens” nesting in a top hat (1812, c. 1824). The “Golden Eagle” of 1833 comes across as though in a Renaissance biblical scene. And as often as not we have little or no background at all, pure white as in a Richard Avedon photo.

We see in Audubon’s pictorial play that for all the obsessive concern for scientific accuracy (all the birds, by the way, are painted life-size), he had as great an interest in finding the right visual idiom in which to put across something of the bird’s personality. And sometimes with the birds – not just with the backgrounds – he makes a great splash of color tell the story. Look at his “Blue Jay” (c. 1825), with the bold dashes of blue in place of closely rendered feathering, al most as though the artist got the upper hand on the scientist. In the end, I think Audobon was a naturalist with the soul of an artist, which isn’t a bad thing to be. And it is why his bird pictures have captivated people’s imaginations for more than 150 years.

The exhibition also includes various fascinating items of “Auduboniana,” my favorite being a marvelous topographical painting in oil by Audubon’s engraver Havell, “View of the Hudson River Near Sing Sing” (c. 1850). Havell, incidentally, moved to New York from London and as a landscape painter became associated with the Hudson River School. The Havell shown here makes me think he’s ripe for a show.

“Audubon’s Aviary” follows on last year’s “Birds of Central Park: Audubon’s Watercolors” as the society cycles through its Audubon materials for public exhibition. In addition, the “Audubon Niche” of the society’s Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture features rotating exhibits of four to six Audubon watercolors.

It is fitting that the New-York Historical Society should be the Audubon repository, for Audubon was a New Yorker. In 1842 Audubon purchased a 35-acre estate along the Hudson River in a part of the city once known as Carmansville. He lived there until his death in 1851. Today, the museums of Audubon Terrace, at Broadway and 156th Street, as well as Trinity Cemetery to the south, stand on parts of the old Audubon estate. Audubon is buried in Trinity Cemetery. His house itself came down in the 1930s when Robert Moses built the West Side Highway. (Audubon lent his name to other stuff in the area, too. At Broadway and 165th Street stands the old Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965.) This was an affluent part of New York at that time, and a 35-acre estate there was a mark of success.

Audubon succeeded against odds. That’s the 19th-century story. So many of the century’s geniuses succeeded without the benefit of formal training in their fields: Audubon, Olmsted, Edison. Some, like Audubon and Olmsted, succeeded only after long years of desultory work and groping toward half-formed dreams, to emerge in midlife with a fervor any who knew them might scarcely have imagined. In our own society, which prizes credentialing over learning, we would have affixed the “loser” label to both these men long before they burst through in their unexpected ways. A visit to Central Park and then the New-York Historical Society will show you what two of the 19th-century’s glorious losers bequeathed to us.

Until March 27 (2 W. 77th Street, at Central Park West, 212-873-3400).