Empire, Art, and Nature: Specimens and their Proxies

Natural history specimens—such as fossils, preserved plants, or taxidermy—serve as tangible evidence of past life while also inspiring the imagination to revive what is irrecoverably lost. Similarly, natural history art works to blend science and creativity. Historian of science Martin Rudwick (2000) describes George Cuvier’s fossil drawings as paper ‘proxies’ for physical specimens. What is the nature of the relationship between the specimen and the proxy? Is it indexical, that is to say, rooted in their direct connection with a once-living organism, like a fossilised bone and a tracing of that fossil? Or does their similarity lie in their symbolic role, in representing absent lives?

This session invites papers exploring natural history art across different historical periods, with a special focus on the late 18th to early 19th centuries, a time of intensified European specimen collection. During the Romantic era, natural history merged scientific with aesthetic inquiry. Papers may explore how specimens and their artistic representations (e.g. ‘proxies’) reflect notions of beauty, creativity, or vitalism—the notion of a life force animating nature. The Enlightenment’s drive to catalogue nature fuelled the collection of botanical and zoological specimens, often tied to colonial exploitation. Papers could examine specimens as sites of imperial exchange and extractive practices. Before type specimens, species classification relied on multiple examples, raising questions of authenticity, replication, and origins. Submissions may investigate how natural history art navigates questions of the singular and the multiple. We welcome diverse perspectives to illuminate these intersections of art, science, and empire.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Dr Sarah Thomas, Birkbeck, sarah.thomas@bbk.ac.uk

Dr Ben Pollitt, University College London, ben.pollitt.15@ucl.ac.uk