Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Natural history illustration is a wonderful art.

  • It can really kind of very subtly highlight the features that are very

  • important for particular species in a way that a photograph

  • can't necessarily.

  • Natural Histories came about because we wanted to let

  • people outside the Museum know about the rich rare book collection contained here.

  • Scientific illustration serves many purposes.

  • Obviously in the days before photography and other forms of documentation developed,

  • drawing or original art was the only way to capture

  • the likeness of certain organisms, people or places,

  • and therefore was the only way to transmit or share this information with others.

  • this is Hooke's Micrographia

  • from 1667. This was the first time many people

  • had seen any of these familiar objects through a microscope

  • Of the published works based on expeditions, none is better known

  • than The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle.

  • Charles Darwin was a member of this trip, and acted as the editor

  • for the published work.

  • While many of the illustrations are depicted on small, hand-colored lithographs

  • some illustrations such as this reproduction

  • of a Toxodon skull, an extinct South American mammal,

  • were deemed too important to show at a reduced scale and were produced

  • in their natural size.

  • We don't know who created these beautiful, beautiful depictions of fish,

  • but clearly whoever it was they were working extremely closely

  • under the guidance of Marcus Bloch this is probably been preserved for about 30

  • years

  • even of the you know a couple of months the specimen has lost its collar

  • so one of the great advantages of having a really good scientific

  • I'm illustration is that the hand depict that color

  • and you can actually count the number of spines from the I

  • to the dorsal fin and they would match these

  • and that's how we know that he was right this is diet on History X

  • I'll re Sevilla marion was the well-known

  • eighteenth-century illustrator travel to Dutch Suriname

  • and collected an illustrated many other the

  • in sex she found there I'll

  • ok in figuring out which works to include

  • wheel 18 examples that were at incredibly widely known we wanted to

  • find some some hidden gems within the collection

  • we also wanted to show our range oven works and the

  • printing processes contained therein home I hope this collection and images

  • will give an understanding of the origins of the science

  • behind these works and a better appreciation

  • on the art eliminating pages are

  • are

  • lmao

  • %uh ok

Natural history illustration is a wonderful art.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it