A mystery at the Horniman Museum

Everyone likes a mystery and this is one that I discovered recently. While looking through the Haddon Collection at the Horniman Museum [1], I came across a card with a drawing of a sea anemone (see below left). Earlier in the Collection, I had been looking at the original paintings by Philip Henry Gosse for Plate V of his book Actinologia Britannica, a comprehensive guide to sea anemones and corals found around the British coast. Close examination of the sea anemone illustrated on the card, especially its shape, colour and arrangement of the tentacles, made me think that this must be the basis for the watercolour that was used for the Plate (below right).

Let's get some more information on the card (shown below in more detail). The drawing has been overwritten by the address and also the term "Picture", both written in ink and apparently in the same handwriting. There is also writing in pencil: "Aiptasia amacha" at the top; "See Pl. V" at bottom right; "44" at top right; and at bottom left "tentacles light umber with pellucid dark centres. Column pale ochre". The card has three postmarks: one for North Queensferry (May 2nd); one indecipherable (May 3rd?); and one for Torquay (May 4th).

L. J. P. Gaskin (the Librarian of the Horniman Museum in the 1930s) identifies the descriptive pencil writing at the bottom left as that of Gosse and states that the drawing provides "A further link with the Actinologia" and was "probably the original of the figure [of Aiptasia couchii] in Plate 5 of that work" [2]. The pencil marking to this effect on the card (presumably added by Haddon, together with the catalogue number 44) also supports this idea, yet the drawing is labelled "Aiptasia amacha". 

This is what Gosse wrote about the material he used to illustrate A. couchii in Actinologia Britannica [3]:

..In the latter part of March of the present year (1858), Dr Hilton of Guernsey found on the shores of that island, and kindly sent to me, several specimens of an Anemone new  to him, and equally so to me.. ..I.. ..ventured to describe it under the name Aiptasia amacha..

..Subsequently, however, I have found that the species has been well described and figured by Mr. W. P. Cocks, in his valuable list of the Actiniæ of Falmouth, published in the Report of the Cornwall Society for 1851, under the title of Anthea Couchii, which specific name takes precedence of mine. It is true, in his description, mention is made of three white lines extending longitudinally up the column, of which no trace exists in my specimens; but by a coloured drawing with which Mr. Cocks has favoured me, I perceive that these lines were not equidistant and symmetrical, but all close together on one side; a circumstance which at once shows their presence to have been accidental, and of no value as a character, while in every other respect, even in the most minute points, his drawing and description agree with my specimens.

As the drawing on the card is labelled "Aiptasia amacha", and does not show evidence of any longitudinal lines on the column, it seems that this is indeed by Gosse and that explains its near identical appearance with the specimen shown in Plate V in Actinologia Britannica.  So, why is the drawing overwritten with the address and the word "Picture"and who wrote the card? I cannot answer the first part of that question, nor the second. My first thought was that Cocks had sent the card, but the handwriting is rather different to many other examples of his (Michael Carver in pers. comm.) and this was probably not Cocks' drawing anyway. If we follow the sequence of postmarks, the card was sent from North Queensferry (the only place of this name being on the Firth of Forth, way outside the known range of A. couchii [3]) via a second destination and then sent on from Torquay to Gosse at Sandhurst, the villa where he lived in St Marychurch, a village within that town. 

A mystery indeed.

[1] http://rwotton.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/stunning-biological-illustrations.html

[2] L. J. P. Gaskin (1937) On a collection of original sketches and drawings of British sea-anemones and corals by Philip Henry Gosse, and his correspondents, 1839-1861, in the Library of the Horniman Museum. Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 1: 65-67

[3] Philip Henry Gosse (1860). Actinologia Britannica. A history of the British sea-anemones and corals. London, John Van Voorst.

I would like to thank the Horniman Museum for allowing me to view the Haddon Collection and to reproduce the illustrations in this post. Michael Carver, Judith Hann and the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society provided valuable insights into the work of W. P. Cocks and it is a pleasure to acknowledge their help.

Stunning biological illustrations: the connection between Gosse, Haddon and the Horniman Museum

Alfred Cort Haddon, the famous anthropologist, was the son of a printer [1]. As a child, he was fascinated by Natural History and his interest was encouraged by his mother, who wrote and illustrated children's books. To draw a wide range of animals, young Alfred made visits to London Zoo, but C. G. Seligman writes [2] that he..

..was destined for his father's business, which he entered on leaving Mill Hill School.

According to Haddon's own account, it took his father scarcely two years to discover that it might be less costly to send his son to Cambridge than to retain him in the firm. So to Cambridge he went...

..to study Zoology. After graduating in 1879, Haddon was appointed to a Demonstratorship by Cambridge University and was made Professor of Zoology at the Royal College of Science in Dublin the following year [2]. He..

..was active in marine biology, being secretary of the Dredging Committee, which did much work off the south-west coast of Ireland, and this led to a series of papers, mostly on the Actinozoa [sea anemones and corals].. ..For some years he divided his time between Dublin and Cambridge, lecturing in Dublin during the winter and spending the summers at Cambridge.

Dredging was a means of exploring marine habitats that were otherwise difficult to reach and Haddon was following in the tradition established by Edward Forbes [3] and continued by others, including Philip Henry Gosse. Gosse lived in Torquay from 1857 until his death in 1888 and that town was visited by, or had as residents, many who were interested in Marine Biology, including Amelia Griffiths, Mary Wyatt, and Charles Kingsley [4-5]. It is thus not surprising that Haddon chose Torquay as the site for teaching a field course in Marine Biology in 1879, when he was 24 years old. He used books and identification works supplied by the superintendent of the Museum in Cambridge and among these must have been Gosse's Actinologia Britannica, an authoritative, descriptive guide that is of value today (although some taxonomic names have changed). Henry Gosse was a meticulous scientist and a gifted illustrator and the plates in his books are wonderful [6].

Eight years after the field course, Haddon wrote to Gosse about the publication of Actinologia Britannica, as it had appeared in sections before the production of the final book [7]. At some point, a collection of watercolours by Gosse passed into Haddon's hands and included were many observations, notes, drawings and watercolours by William Pennington Cocks, the Cornish natural historian and retired surgeon that had been sent to Gosse by this "generous contributor of his own material in the cause of science, and an authority on the actinians and other marine fauna of Falmouth Bay" [8]. The collection (see above) was donated to the Horniman Museum in 1906, long after Haddon had shifted his interest to Anthropology (that began in a visit to the Torres Straits in 1888) and a year before Edmund Gosse published, anonymously, his less than flattering memoir Father and Son [9]. Earlier, Edmund had written a biography of his father at the request of E. Ray Lankester and The Naturalist of the Sea-Shore: the life of Philip Henry Gosse [10] has descriptions of Henry Gosse's techniques as an illustrator.

If I was stunned by the plates in Actinologia Britannica, can you imagine how I felt when viewing the originals held by the Horniman Museum (three of which are shown above)? This is what Edmund wrote about Henry's methods [10]:

His books were always well illustrated, and often very copiously and brilliantly illustrated, by his own pencil. It was his custom from his earliest childhood to make drawings and paintings of objects which came under his notice.. ..In July, 1855, he stated.. ..that he had up to that date accumulated in his portfolios more than three thousand figures of animals or parts of animals, of which about two thousand five hundred were of the invertebrate classes, and about half of these latter done under the microscope. During the remainder of his life he added perhaps two thousand more drawings to his collections. The remarkable feature about these careful works of art was that, in the majority of cases, they were drawn from the living animal..

..[Henry] Gosse as a draughtsman was trained in the school of the miniature painters. When a child he had been accustomed to see his father [a professional miniaturist and illustrator] inscribe the outline of a portrait on the tiny area of the ivory, and then fill it in with stipplings of pure body-colour. He possessed to the last the limitations of the miniaturist. He had no distance, no breadth of tone, no perspective; but a miraculous exactitude in rendering shades of colour and minute peculiarities of form and marking. In late years he was accustomed to make a kind of patchwork quilt of each full-page illustration, collecting as many individual forms as he wished to present, each separately coloured and cut out, and then gummed into its place on the general plate, upon which a background of rocks, sand and seaweeds was then washed in..

We can see examples of Henry's "patchwork" approach in the Plates shown above. Close examination of Plate I shows the top right section to be stuck on as are the sea anemones numbered 2, 7 and 8 in Plate III and sea anemones 7, 8, 9 and 11 in Plate VI. As Edmund points out, they are intended as accurate aids to identification, not as works of art, although I think they are beautiful, as are some of Henry's very small watercolours (see below).

They are truly the work of a miniaturist, as there is no shortage of paper on which to paint and it could be that Henry Gosse intended to convey real-life scale as well as accuracy of form and colour.

These are only a very small number of the illustrations held by the Horniman Museum and I would like to thank the Museum for letting me see the Haddon Collection and for allowing me to take the photographs that accompany this post.

[1] H. J. Fleure, rev. Sandra Rouse (2004-2016) Alfred Cort Haddon. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3326

[2] C. G. Seligman (1940) Obituary of Dr A. C. Haddon F.R.S.. Nature 145: 848-850.

[3] Daniel Merriman (1963) Edward Forbes – Manxman. Progress in Oceanography 3: 191- 206.

[4] http://www.rwotton.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/wome-on-shore.html

[5] http://rwotton.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/charles-kingsley-creation-and-evolution.html

[6] http://rwotton.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/two-wonderful-books.html

[7] R. B. Freeman and Douglas Wertheimer (1980) Philip Henry Gosse: A Bibliography. Folkestone, Wm. Dawson & Sons.

[8] L. J. P. Gaskin (1937) On a collection of original sketches and drawings of British sea-anemones and corals by Philip Henry Gosse, and his correspondents, 1839-1861, in the Library of the Horniman Museum. Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 1: 65-67

[9] Edmund Gosse (1907) Father and Son. London, William Heinemann.

[10] Edmund Gosse (1890) The Naturalist of the Sea-Shore: the life of Philip Henry Gosse. London, William Heinemann.

Our family's box of curios

I mentioned our family's box of curios - a mini "cabinet of curiosities" - in an earlier blog post [1]. The objects in the box fascinated me as a child and provided a connection to exotic parts of the World, far removed from my insular life, but the only contents I could recall were a tiger's claw and some hairs from a giraffe's tail. That may have been because, even as a young child, I had a fascination with Natural History.

Last Wednesday, I visited Torquay Museum to give a talk about Philip Henry Gosse and during the previous evening I was able to visit my brother David who still lives in Paignton, our home town. When reading the blog post [1], he had remembered the box of curios and was sure that it had been stored in the loft of his house after we emptied the contents of our family home during the clear-out after my father died nearly fifty years ago. Why the box was selected to be saved when much else was thrown out was not clear to either of us, but much searching in the loft of David's house didn't turn it up and we left it at that. Then, by looking in another place, the box was found and David was able to show it to me last week. Its contents are shown below.

 

There was the tiger claw and a label mentioning the hair from a giraffe's tail (I'm sure that there were at least three, all having now disappeared). The other curios were a pipe, two combs, two wooden spoons and a ring with plastic "charms" attached by woven threads. The origins of all the artefacts remain a mystery, but it was good to know that most of the contents of the box of curios were still there. When I was very young, they were my introduction to an interest in the fascinating objects found in Museums and similar collections.

The items are shown in more detail below (photographs by David Wotton) – can anyone provide information on these artefacts?

[1] http://www.rwotton.blogspot.com/2015/07/two-wonderful-museums-and-mention-of.html

Two wonderful books

As many readers know, I admire the contributions to Natural History made by Philip Henry Gosse and have read facsimiles of many of his books. I have also had the privilege of looking through First Editions held in Libraries and Museums and have seen some of the artwork used for illustrations in both books and lectures [1]. Plates by Gosse impress with their vibrancy and accuracy and they enhance the enthusiastic descriptions of organisms and their environment that he gives in the text. Gosse studied organisms in the field, in his aquarium, and under the microscope, and did much to promote these three approaches in the study of Natural History. One can imagine the impact of his publications in the mid-nineteenth century and it is not surprising that Gould described Gosse as the "David Attenborough of his day". In addition to popularising what was to become a passion for some Victorians, he also made important contributions to science and to scientific debate.

Last week, I received an e-mail from a friend who is reducing the number of books in his library and, knowing of my interest in Gosse, asked if I would like First Editions of A Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast and Actinologia Britannica. I was astonished and said "yes" immediately, as these two books contain some of Gosse's best illustrations [2]. They have now arrived and are both in excellent condition, with the plates in their original state (see below).

Why do these books from over 150 years ago so impress me? The answer comes partly from my admiration for Gosse as one of the best observers, and communicators, of Natural History, but I also react against the image of the man portrayed by his son, Edmund, in Father and Son [3], that stresses the rôle that religion played in his life and which Edmund found stifling. I like to see fair play and, while not disguising my difficulties with Henry's profound Christian beliefs, I think that he deserves to be recognised in a very positive light.

[1] http://www.rwotton.blogspot.com/2015/01/brilliant-illustrations-of-organisms.html

[2] R. B. Freeman and Douglas Wertheimer (1980) Philip Henry Gosse: A Bibliography. Folkestone, Wm. Dawson & Sons.

[3] Edmund Gosse (1907) Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments. London, Heinemann.