The influence of Sarah Trimmer on young J.M.W.Turner

As a ten-year-old, J.M.W.Turner (JMWT) was sent to live with an uncle in Brentford, probably because his mother was mentally unstable and his sister had a fatal illness. He stayed for about a year [1] and there met Mrs Sarah Trimmer (see above, in a 1790 portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, held in the National Portrait Gallery), becoming a close friend of her son Henry (three years younger than JMWT), who was later to become the vicar of Heston [2]. Henry Trimmer was an artist as well as a priest and it is thought that he received training in drawing from his mother. She was well-qualified to do so, as she was [3]: 

..the only daughter of the artist Joshua Kirby (1716-1774) and his wife, Sarah Bull (c.1718-1775). She was educated by her father and at Mrs Justiner’s School for Young Ladies in Ipswich. In 1755 the family moved to London; acquaintances there included Thomas Gainsborough, Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and William Hogarth. 

A very well-connected lady, then, for an aspiring artist to meet, especially as her father had also been tutor in linear perspective to the Prince of Wales (later George III), a subject that was to interest JMWT. We do not know how frequently JMWT visited the Trimmer home, but Sarah Trimmer’s interests in education, and in art and nature, must have influenced him. Hers was a strong voice in the way children should be taught in the early Nineteenth Century and she published influential books [3]: 

Although Trimmer advocated conservative views, later students of educational methods and children’s books credit her with two innovations that became commonplace in the nineteenth century. She popularized the use of pictorial material in books for children.. [and] ..Trimmer’s other innovation was the use of animals, birds, and the natural world in stories she called fables.  

Perhaps her best-known book was An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature and Reading the Holy Scriptures adapted to the Capacities of Children published in 1780, five years before JMWT went to stay in Brentford. Given that the book was aimed at children and their education, it must have been a topic of conversation in the Trimmer household and one imagines that JMWT read the book and perhaps discussed its contents with both Henry and Sarah. What would JWMT have made of the following passages [4]: 

The trees and plants in general would die without air; and we should have no winds, which are very useful, as I told you before, in respect to blowing the ships along, and driving the clouds about, so that they may break and fall in different places on the dry land, instead of returning back to the sea, from whence the sun draws the vapours that form them. The wind is a great stream of air, and though it sometimes does mischief, yet it is of great use, as the air would become extremely unwholesome if it were to remain still and motionless. 

Neither is the world all land; for there are vast hollow places between the different kingdoms, and they are filled up with water. The largest waters.. ..are called oceans, lesser ones seas, and there are others yet smaller, which run in among the land, that are called rivers; there are, besides, smaller pieces, called ponds, ditches, brooks and others.. ..These generally spring out of the earth, and are at first only little streams, but run along till they join with others, and are increased by the rains that fall, and so in time become great rivers like the Thames. 

It is likely that it was Sarah Trimmer who took JMWT to Margate [1], accompanying her children, as her son John was ill with consumption and sea air was thought to be good for the health, especially for lung diseases. Imagine then how a woman who could teach drawing, who was familiar with the London art world, who believed in the importance of illustrations in books [3], and who wrote a book about education that encouraged children to look at all aspects of the natural world, would have on JMWT. 

Familiar with ships on the Thames, he now saw the sea, and boats setting sail on longer voyages. These images must have made a strong impression on the young boy and spurred his need to record what he saw. Some watercolour paintings of Margate, from a little after JMWT’s initial visit, survive and one is shown below. I have no idea whether this was one of the pictures that appeared in his father’s shop, and which exposed JMWT’s work to potential buyers and those who could enhance his prospects as a budding artist, but one could easily imagine that such a precocious talent was recognised by those who saw these early works. 

If Sarah Trimmer was an influence on the development of JMWT as an artist, and as a close observer of the natural world, her evangelical Christianity seems to have had a lesser significance. Perhaps JMWT found this kind of religious thinking to be too limiting for his fast-developing vision and revolutionary spirit? 

[1] James Hamilton (1997) Turner: A Life. London, Hodder & Stoughton 

[2] http://www.bhsproject.co.uk/families_trimmer.shtml#HST 

[3] Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg (2004) Trimmer [née Kirby], Sarah. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22740 

[4] Mrs Trimmer (1780) An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature and Reading the Holy Scriptures adapted to the Capacities of Children. London, Dodsley.

Underwater flowers

 

Flowering plants (angiosperms) began to dominate the Earth’s vegetation about 100 million years ago and, while other, more primitive, plants continue to be abundant, the present diversity of angiosperms is remarkable. When thinking of flowering plants, our minds may turn to beautiful garden borders, meadows and occasional clumps of flowers in woods and verges. Yet flowering plants have also invaded water bodies; although this is really a re-invasion as land plant evolved from distant aquatic ancestors.

Anyone visiting a stream draining from chalk strata is impressed by the amount of vegetation growing over its bed and invading from the margins. There are many microscopic algae that are only visible under a microscope, but two common flowering plants often dominate: water cress and water crowfoot. Of the two, water cress grows into the stream from the banks and can extend right across narrow channels, a habit that has been exploited in the development of commercial cress beds fed by water from chalk streams. The bulk of the plant remains above the water surface and this contrasts with water crowfoot, where plants grow in dense stands, rooted into the bed of the stream and affecting its flow pattern. Water crowfoot is a relative of the buttercup and its flowers are very similar in structure, although they are white, rather than yellow, in colour. It is only during flowering that we see water crowfoot above the water surface, although stands can become so dense that, at times of low flow in summer, they may be exposed to the air. They are well adapted to life in flowing water. The drag on the mass of leaves is counteracted by an effective rhizome and root system that ensures anchorage on the stream bed and the plants engineer the stream around them. Stands provide an obstruction to flow that creates channels of faster-moving water between plants and this serves not only to keep the substratum clear of sediment, but the growing leaves are also unaffected by deposition and can thus photosynthesise efficiently. In contrast, the base of the plant is an area of sediment build-up and this includes much organic matter [1] that serves as a source of nutrients - another way in which the plants engineer their habitat to their advantage.

Although water cress and water crowfoot are both aquatic plants, with the former fitting the definition less easily than the latter, seagrasses are truly aquatic. As their name suggests, these plants are marine, spending the whole of their life cycle under water. Seagrasses have a world-wide distribution and are perhaps most commonly associated with tropical seas and, especially, reefs, where the water is clear and there is good light penetration to the substratum, allowing efficient photosynthesis. Nutrients needed for growth taken up by roots and stored in rhizomes that also serve to stabilise soft sediments. Interestingly, seagrasses are more closely related to lilies and ginger than to grasses [2] and their colonisation of soft sediments results in large meadows when conditions for their growth are favourable. These are then grazed upon by many animals and they also form shelter for many others organisms and a substratum for yet more.

Seagrasses are also found commonly in shallow temperate seas that have sufficient transparency to allow the plants to grow. As I grew up by the sea in Torbay, and had a love of Natural History, I knew about seagrasses, but had no idea that there were meadows of the plants so close to some of my collecting spots. Neither did I know that seagrasses were flowering plants. Like many, I thought that seaweeds alone were the dominant marine plants around coasts.

Two of my favourite places to visit in Torbay were Elbury [Elberry] Cove and the rocks below Corbyn’s Head, where I spent time collecting marine creatures for aquarium tanks. [3] Both locations now have interesting and informative signs (see below) describing the importance and susceptibility to damage by boats etc. of the seagrass meadows just offshore. It is likely that Zostera is one of the seagrasses and Henry Gosse mentions this plant when describing the results of dredging a little further up the coast:

Now we have made our offing, and can look well into Teignmouth Harbour, the bluff point of the Ness some four miles distant, scarcely definable now against the land. We pull down sails, set her head for the Orestone Rock [just off Torbay], and drift with the tide. The dredge is hove overboard, paying out some forty fathoms of line, for we have about twelve or fourteen fathoms’ water here, with a nice rough, rubbly bottom, over which, as we hold the line in hand, we feel the iron lip of the dredge grate and rumble, without catches or jumps. Now and then, for a brief space, it goes smoothly, and the hand feels nothing; that is when a patch of sand is crossed, or a bed of zostera, or close-growing sea-weeds, each a good variation for yielding. [4]

As Gosse was a devout Creationist, the presence of flowering plants in soft sediments around marine coasts would be another example of the extraordinary events of the six days in which all living things - and all fossil ones - came into existence. [5] To those of us who cannot share such a view, the presence of flowering seagrasses underwater is another example of the extraordinary powers of evolution.

In terrestrial habitats the fertilisation of ova by pollen is aided by insects, wind or other agents and there have been extraordinary adaptations to ensure that fertilisation is achieved - by evolving nectar and/or scent to attract insects, by evolving elaborate colour patterns that are attractive, by producing pollen in enormous quantities, etc. - yet flowers are retained by seagrasses where neither insects or wind can be involved in pollination. Seagrass plants bear both male and female flowers and the pollen from male flowers is released into the water and thus wafts around the plants. The use of water for fertilisation is, of course, extremely common in many marine organisms, including seaweeds and many animals, and that makes underwater flowers seem less unlikely than on first consideration. Natural History is full of such discoveries and one is always learning something new. That’s the satisfaction of it - that, and the sense of wonder at just what can evolve over millions of years and millions of generations. 

[1] Cotton, J.A., Wharton, G., Bass, J.A.B., Heppell, C.M. and Wotton, R.S. (2006) Plant-water-sediment interactions in lowland permeable streams: investigating the effect of seasonal changes in vegetation cover on flow patterns and sediment accumulation. Geomorphology 77: 320-324.

[2] http://www.seagrasswatch.org/seagrass.html

[3] Roger S Wotton (2020) Walking With Gosse: Natural History, Creation and Religious Conflicts. e-book.

[4] Philip Henry Gosse (1865) A Year at the Shore. London, Alexander Strahan.

[5] Philip Henry Gosse (1857) Omphalos: an attempt to untie the geological knot. London, John Van Voorst.

 

The awesome cyanotypes of Anna Atkins

 

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 used of line drawings, or watercolours, that could be made into plates 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 the use of 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 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 garter 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 wonderful blue image, 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 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 their Latin binomial 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, these images 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.

 

[2] http://www.rwotton.blogspot.com/2013/08/nature-printing.html

 

[3] http://www.rwotton.blogspot.com/2014/1/where-science-meets-art-usefulness-and.html

 

[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.