Natural History Illustrators Who Combined Science and Art

In the Suriname plates, Merian often shows plants alongside the different stages of the insects that feed on them. The red mombin plate puts insects, leaves, flowers, and fruit in the same view. Start there to see how much information she can put on one page while leaving each shape readable.

The Wild Turkey opens The Birds of America with a male so large that the bird seems to take over the page. The legs and head give you points to compare with the sweep of the body feathers. It shows how Audubon used the size of a print to make unfamiliar anatomy visible.

On the Rosa centifolia foliacea plate in Les Roses, the open flower, unopened buds, and leaves give you different ways to recognize the plant. Redouté places them far enough apart to compare without losing the sense of a living branch. The New York Public Library has a digitized copy of the plate.

Start with the red poppy in Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal. Its engraved plate shows the opened flower, the capsule, and the leaves together, with small labels that help untangle the parts. Blackwell drew from living plants and hand-colored copies for subscribers who paid for color. The book was meant to help readers recognize plants used in medicine.

Catesby often placed an animal alongside a plant from the same region. Start with The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands and compare the woodpecker plate with other birds in the same volume. The arrangement gives the reader a hint of where to think of the bird living.

Stone painted specimens in London’s Leverian Museum. In A Scarlet Ibis, the long bill and the turn of the neck give the bird a recognizable shape alongside the color that makes it immediately striking. These paintings preserve details of specimens as well as a record of what the collections held.

This detail from Elizabeth Gould’s preparatory study of the superb fairywren shows how she broke a spread wing into rows of feathers. The full design for The Birds of Australia also includes a female at the nest. Compare the close view of anatomy with the behavior Gould recorded across the whole composition.

Lear’s parrot plates show why the pose of a whole bird matters to identification. In the blue-and-yellow macaw, the length of the tail and the strong curve of the beak register clearly. His work from living birds gives the perched figure a kind of balance that helps you imagine it shifting its weight.

In the Spumellaria plate of Kunstformen der Natur, radiolarians are arranged so their outlines and skeleton patterns can be compared at a glance. Symmetry gives the print much of its appeal. It also makes the differences between forms easier to notice, which is part of why the arrangement works.

Potter’s painting of Flammulina velutipes lets you compare details of a fungus with the eye of someone asking how it lives. She corresponded with the mycologist Charles McIntosh and submitted a paper on fungal spores to the Linnean Society. Her drawings include features that were easy for others to miss.

Snelling drew for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. Her plate of Rhododendron forrestii shows a plant that can spread close to the ground, with leaves and flowers drawn in enough detail to compare. Follow her plants in the RHS collection to see how many views and details can fit on one useful sheet.

Bauer made field drawings and recorded colors by number so he could finish his watercolors later. In his showy banksia, the spikes and serrations give you clues as important as the final color. The method let him record details in the field without needing to complete a painting while the specimen was fresh.

One of Fitch’s plates of the giant South American water lily shows the opening flower and the space it takes up above the plant. Compare it with the other stages in the series. The illustrations record features of cultivated specimens and make a flower that changes rapidly easier to study.

In Blue Poppy Growing on Mount Tonglo, Sikkim-Himalaya, Marianne North sets the plant against a rough slope. The tall format gives the flowers, unopened buds, and leaves space at different heights. Start with the upward sweep of the stem and notice how the surroundings give the plant a place to grow.