SESSION: 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 imagery 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 trace or the tracing of a fossil? Or does their similarity lie in their symbolic role, in representing absent lives?
This session will explore 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. Some papers will 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. Other papers will 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. The panel will also reflect on how natural history art navigates questions of the singular and the multiple.
Session Convenors:
Sarah Thomas, Birkbeck
Ben Pollitt University College London
Speakers:
Prudence Gibson, University of New South Wales, Sydney
The Doctrine of Signatures: plant medicine and the aesthetics of cure
From the late Middle Ages to the Early Modern epoch, the Doctrine of Signatures was a form of visual plant medicine. Plants that resembled human body parts were considered to have healing properties to treat related ailments. For instance, kidney beans were good for kidney health, walnuts were good for brain function, and the heart-shaped leaves of digitalis cured the heart. These plant-human connections reflected a Judeo-Christian interest in the moral curative goodness of nature for humans.
The illustrated manuscripts of the Doctrine of Signatures were included in treatises by Dioscorides, Giulielmus di Saliceto, Paracelsus, Giovanni Battista della Porta and Jakob Boehme. These plant-human images (part specimen, part illustration) offered pre- and non-literate people the mnemonic means of remembering which plants could cure what. The relevance of the Doctrine of Signature plants, as specimens and proxies, persisted into the 19th century as accessible medicine. Today, they perform as examples of reciprocal plant-human animating forces and as a means of creating closer plant-human relations.
In 2009, Giorgio Agamben said the ‘signatures of all things’ are not just marks but primordial forces of being. This paper brings plant-human knowledge systems into the present by focussing on English-Australian artist Caroline Rothwell, who has made many artworks that address the Doctrine of Signatures over the last 15 years. This paper argues that the imperial violence and extraction associated with colonial plant collection, identification, and medicinal knowledge can be counteracted by a renewed understanding of historic plant knowledge, symbolic plant-human mimesis, and the enduring aesthetics of cure.
Shing-Kwan Chan, Princeton University
Imaging the Specimen, Imagining the Light: A Chinese Insect and its Visual Representation in European Science
At the turn of the nineteenth century, physical specimens of the insect Fulgora candelaria (now Pyrops candelaria) reached Europe from Canton, China via maritime trade. While these specimens fascinated European naturalists, a notable depiction—a 1798 engraving by the British entomologist Edward Donovan (1768–1837)—features a biologically non-existent bioluminescence. This paper argues that the striking gap between biological reality and Donovan’s visual representation arose not only from physical distance, but also from an ‘epistemic distance’. The physical distance separated European naturalists from the living insect and its native ecology in South China. European scientists’ reliance on silent, decontextualized specimens, in turn, created a profound epistemic distance. In this void, they projected familiar analogies, speculative reasoning, and Orientalist fantasies onto the silent specimens. The fiction of luminosity was not Donovan’s invention; it stemmed from inherited ideas and was later codified through flawed taxonomic analogies. Remarkably, the fiction persisted, surviving formal scientific debates and continued to be visually depicted nearly a century later. It reveals scientific illustration not as a passive mirror, but as an active site of production, where epistemic gaps and cultural projections converged to create enduring scientific fictions. Ultimately, this paper interrogates not merely the ‘wrongness’ of Donovan’s image but serves as a Foucauldian ‘archaeology of knowledge’, revealing the specific episteme that allowed such an authoritative yet false narrative and representation to emerge and persist.
Molly Duggins, National Art School, Sydney
Specimen ecologies in the Macquarie collector’s chest
This paper considers the relationships between specimens, paintings, and materials in the Macquarie collector’s chest (c. 1818), an early nineteenth-century natural history cabinet created in colonial New South Wales by convict artists and artisans. Commissioned by Captain James Wallis, Commandant of the Newcastle penal settlement, as a gift of patronage for Governor Lachlan Macquarie, the chest features a kaleidoscopic array of preserved birds, insects, and shells from the Sydney Basin, procured with the aid of the Awabakal community of Mulubinba. Arranged in a series of glazed drawers and removable trays, these inert specimens are revivified in a suite of landscape paintings of the region on the chest’s interior panelling. Through object-image dialogues generated by the chest’s tactile interface, activated by the manipulation of drawers and panels, the specimens and their painted proxies conjoin to form an environmental assemblage of the colony.
Much, however, is excluded or obfuscated in this constructed vision. Beholden to the isolating principles of the box and the frame, the chest subscribes to the compartmental aesthetics of contemporary natural history collection and display that distilled colonial environments into discrete narratives. Examining the chest from an ecocritical perspective offers a way to unbox its contents. This paper traces the extraction and fabrication of materials employed in the chest’s creation to reveal embedded natural and cultural ecologies that traverse its compartments. Focusing on the representation of freshwater birds in the chest, it tracks their journey from wetland community to their capture, preservation, and display as a form of environmental rehabilitation.
Elisa deCourcy, Australian National University
Absence and Abundance: the ecological and material intersections in Theresa Walker’s photographs of Palawa seaweed
During the first half of the 1850s, professional colonial sculptor and artist Theresa Walker made photographic salted paper prints of seaweeds where kanamaluka/the Tamar River meets the Bass Strait in northern lutruwita/Tasmania. Walker’s seaweed photographs were numerous. None survive today. The record of her images comes to us through Irish botanist and phycologist, William Henry Harvey, who visited Walker on 3 March 1855. In a letter penned to his sister, now held with his papers at the Grey Herbarium Harvard University, Harvey recalls meeting Walker and outlines the qualities and merit of her photographic seaweeds. This is the earliest recorded instance of a woman working independently with a photographic process in the Australian colonies.
To conjure Walker’s seaweed photographs, I turn to the vocabularies of her practice as a sculptor and natural history hand-colourist, mobilising these various mediums’ shared languages with the new technology of photography. I also observe the writing and activities of her contemporaries, colonial or otherwise, for whom algae excited particular fascination. Seaweed’s slippery mid-nineteenth-century position as both wild and collectable, foreshadowed the commencement of a broader set of colonial and twentieth-century industrial behaviours that impacted and gradually depleted Palawa kelp forests. My paper repatriates Walker’s photographs to the global conversations on photography and maritime ecology to which they belonged. But this is a fraught exercise that draws into focus larger eco-historical questions about how Art History deals with a subject in which both impression and referent are now lost.
Silas Edwards, Justus Liebig University, Giessen
The Capture of Colour: Illustrated Identification Guides and the Butterfly Trade ca. 1900
In the late nineteenth century, printing innovations, including steam presses and aniline inks, made it possible to reproduce the colours of the natural world on paper for a mass audience. Entomologists seized the opportunity to disseminate images of moths and butterflies; creatures that were alluringly colourful and increasingly mobile within imperial networks of trade and extraction. The rise of affordable, colour-illustrated guides coincided with a major surge in Lepidoptera collecting in Europe and beyond.
This paper examines how one of the most prominent guides of the period, Adalbert Seitz’s Macrolepidoptera of the World, mediated the relationship between insects and their collectors. Across its tens of thousands of images, Macrolepidoptera never depicts a living insect. Instead, the illustrations represent prepared specimens, the wings stretched out symmetrically to reveal the full extent of their patterns and colours. In turn, these images incited the reproduction of such objects, spurring collectors to transform living three-dimensional bodies into a standardised visual currency.
In marketing Seitz’s publication, the publisher explicitly targeted colonial officials and settlers, who were encouraged to use the images to profit from the trade in large, colourful species fetishised in Europe as symbols of tropical abundance. Meanwhile, the arduous and skilful work of capture and preparation was often subcontracted to indigenous people under coercive conditions. By tracing these entangled processes of illustration, collecting, and labour, the paper explores how colour prints served not only as scientific ‘identification aids’ but as a pivotal site in the processes of commodification, aesthetic construction and colonial extraction.