The digital age has made it easy for us to identify plants
and animals using selections from the millions of illustrations that are available
on the Web. Accessing images of specimens was a much greater challenge in the Nineteenth
Century, just when more and more people were becoming interested in Natural
History and wanting to identify plants and animals they collected from the countryside,
or the shore.
One solution to the need for illustration was the use of
line drawings, or watercolours, that could be made into plates, printed and thus appear
in books. A good example comes in the work of Philip Henry Gosse, who was both a
scientist and an able artist, so knew exactly which features to portray. Other approaches
used real specimens preserved in spirit, or by taxidermy, but these were
only readily available in Museums and similar collections. Freshly-collected plants
could be compared with those in herbaria, labelled collections of pressed and dried
specimens, but these also were not widely available, although many amateurs made
their own. However, they were dependent on the herbaria, and illustrations, of
experts to ensure accurate identification. Mary Wyatt used herbarium specimens
of seaweeds to allow the publication of a necessarily limited number of books
to aid identification, while Bradbury and others extended this approach by
pressing plants on to lead plates to make an impression. Each of the plates was
then coated with copper and could be used to print many copies, some in
monochrome and some using colour for even greater realism [1]. Like illustrations
made from engravings of other art work, these become available widely [2,3].
Of the many examples of Nature Printing, among the best
known are the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, the daughter of John George Children
FRS, for whom she had earlier prepared 250 woodcuts of shells for his translation
of a work by Lamarck, the original not being illustrated [4]. Through her
father, she had contacts with Herschel and thus the early development of cyanotypes
in which chemicals are transformed by light to give a blue background,
with the subject blocking the effect of light and appearing white. With her
keen interest in illustration, Anna Atkins made cyanotypes of seaweeds that
were then bound into a small number of volumes.
Complete collections of Anna Atkins cyanotypes have become
justly famous – and very valuable. I was privileged to look through the large
collection that was owned by Frederick John Horniman and is now held by the
Horniman Museum in London. Each is printed on watermarked Whatman paper, mostly
of 1846 and 1849 in the volumes that I saw, and all have a wonderful quality. As
aids to identification, they give dimension and the arrangement of fronds of
the seaweeds but no natural colour. One would be hard pressed to identify fresh
specimens from some illustrations, especially of small algae, or those that are
toughened with natural strengthening (see the images below for examples). Mounting
specimens that were translucent meant that some surface, and internal, detail
became visible and these cyanotypes are especially impressive.
Anna Atkins labelled each sheet with the Latin binomial
of the seaweed and this would have been written in ink on strips of paper that were then
cleared, most probably using highly refined oil. The labels could then be
mounted with each alga and their outline is seen clearly in the prints at the
Horniman Museum. Whatever their practical use, the Anna Atkins cyanotypes are beautiful works
of art from Nature and it was a privilege to see them. Soon to be superseded by
photography, they mark an exciting step in the Art – and Science - of
Biological Illustration [3].
[1] Roderick Cave (2010) Impressions
of Nature: A History of Nature Printing. London, The British Library.
[4] A. E. Gunther (1978) John George Children, F.R.S.
(1777-1852) of the British Museum. Mineralogist and reluctant Keeper of
Zoology. Bulletin of the British Museum
(Natural History) 6: 75-108
I am grateful to Helen Williamson and the Horniman Museum
for letting me see these valuable works and for allowing me to reproduce
pictures of them in this blog post.
For those wanting to make cyanotypes of their own, a video
explaining the technique can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvvVUfdqDaM
and I recommend Roderick Cave's brilliant book (reference [1] above) as an
introduction to all aspects of Nature Printing.
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