Natural History

Plants, animals and specimens drawn for science, from Renaissance encyclopaedias and botanical plates to art about collecting.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Natural History are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Before photography, knowledge of plants and animals travelled largely through pictures, and artists were essential to science. Albrecht Dürer's watercolour Young Hare (1502) records fur almost hair by hair, while his woodcut Rhinoceros (1515), made from a written description and a sketch, spread a plated, partly imaginary beast across Europe. Conrad Gessner's Historiae animalium (1551–58) gathered hundreds of animal images into an encyclopaedia.

Maria Sibylla Merian travelled to Suriname and published Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705), showing insects through their life cycles on the plants they fed on. Pierre-Joseph Redouté's colour-printed stipple engravings of lilies and roses set a standard for botanical elegance in the early 1800s, and Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904) turned radiolarians and jellyfish into ornament. Contemporary artists such as Mark Dion revisit specimen drawers, field kits and expeditions to ask what the urge to classify leaves out.