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.
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.
[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.
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