Art, Literature, and Lore  pg 1. pg 2.

Artistic expressions were as much a part of natural history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as were systematic descriptions and pickled specimens. Since scientific documentation was often unable to convey accurately the look and feel of life forms—a dried brown specimen could not reveal the brilliance of a flower’s petals—pictures became a crucial means of shaping knowledge about the natural world. In an age before photography and film, a drawn or painted picture was indeed worth a thousand words.

Yet pictures are never neutral. To create images that were scientifically useful, some artist-naturalists isolated plants and animals from their environments or depicted different parts or views of the same organism simultaneously. In these and other pictures, flourishes of the imagination often transcended empirical concerns. Even in representations intended as scientific documents, the force of human creativity projected itself onto the raw material of nature.

To complicate matters further, many of the pictures were not drawn from life but rather from specimens. Such depictions are twice removed from the “real thing,” the living plant or animal.

Watercolors and Drawings

1. Mark Catesby (1683–1749)
The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands
Catesby’s Natural History, first published from 1731 to 1747, was the first major book on the flora and fauna of the New World. Believing that illustrations were “particularly Essential to the perfect understanding” of nature, the English artist-naturalist created innovative images that vividly depict the close relationship between animals and plants.

2. William Bartram (1739–1823)
The Great Alachua-Savana in East Florida…
Bartram’s birds-eye view of the Alachua Savanna (now Payne’s Prairie State Preserve, a great basin in north-central Florida) shows an entire ecosystem, with land, water, flora and fauna merging to create an American Eden. Bartram wrote in his Travels that here, amidst the “fragrant Orange groves” and the “transcendent Palm,” birds and animals “mix together, appearing happy and contented in the enjoyment of peace.”

3. William Bartram (1739–1823)Common or Eastern Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana)
Bartram most likely encountered the persimmon tree while cultivating his sugar-cane plantation in Florida. He sought to capture the glory of creation in drawings like this one, of plants either gathered in his family’s botanical garden and nursery in Kingsessing (now southwest Philadelphia) or collected on his travels through what is now the southeastern United States. In keeping with the Linnaean emphasis on the observation of visible, external characteristics, Bartram depicted what he called the “outward furniture of nature.”

4. Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815).
Northern Short-Tailed Shrew? (Blarina brevicauda) with House in Background (catalogued as “Mole”)
Since most of the drawings in Benjamin Smith Barton’s collection are unlabeled, precise identification of their subjects is sometimes difficult. The appealing creature in this image has been listed in the APS manuscript catalogue as a mole, but recent investigations have determined that it is most likely a shrew. Unlike most moles, this animal has visible eyes; it also lacks the mole’s large digging feet and long claws.