INTEREST IN VICTORIAN natural history illustration has burgeoned in recent years. Along with handsome, informative shows at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (“Picturing Natural History”), at the American Philosophical Society (“Natural History in North America, 1730–1860”), and at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Melbourne (“Nature's Art Revealed”), the year 2003 saw an entire conference devoted to the subject in Florence, Italy. In 2004, the eastern United States was treated to two more fauna- and flora-inspired shows, both dealing specifically with nineteenth-century British science and illustration.

In the first of these, John Gould's (1804–88) ornithological work was beautifully displayed at the Australian Embassy in Washington, D. C. Gould, the English “bird man” of the nineteenth century, produced over forty imperial folio volumes with over three thousand hand-colored prints depicting the birds of every continent save Africa. His illustrators included some of the best practitioners of the art of natural history: his wife, Elizabeth Coxen Gould; Edward Lear; Henry Constantine Richter; William Hart; and Joseph Wolf. Gould's volumes were among the very first large-format, colored books on ornithology. Gould himself oversaw the whole enterprise and in addition worked on many of the illustrations and did much of the lithography. An entrepreneur as well as artist and scientist, he sometimes had three or four projects going simultaneously.

Gould began his scientific endeavors humbly enough–as taxidermist for the London Zoological Society. There he first got to know the many types of birds and animals that were shipped to London for further study. And there, too, in the 1830s, he initiated production of the large-format books. He and Elizabeth worked together on a book featuring one hundred newly discovered birds from Asia, A Century of Birds Hitherto Unfigured from the Himalaya Mountains (1830–33). This volume's success led to others, including the Birds of Australia, a seven-volume set published between 1840 and 1848, the rare and handsome volumes featured in the Washington exhibition. This monumental opus took both of the Goulds to Australia, where Gould came into contact with a post-Darwinian H. M. S. Beagle voyage and bought ornithological specimens from the Beagle's officers. Previously Gould had helped Charles Darwin with his cataloguing of birds of the Galapagos.

The show at the Australian Embassy exhibited illustrations from Gould's book as well as his collection of Australian birds. Two magnificent folios greeted the entering viewer. The first was open to the “Red-tailed Black Cockatoo” (Calypyotrhynchus banksii), a huge black cockatoo with red outer tail-feathers and streaked yellow inner ones. This illustration was rendered by H. C. Richter and the plate was displayed alongside skins of the bird. The second folio featured the only two-page illustration in the Australian set and showed the “Satin Bowerbird” (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus) with a male in courtship with a female, a juvenile, and a second female that has just entered his flame-shaped bower of straw. This illustration, by Elizabeth Gould, was also complemented by bird skins–ornithological specimens prepared carefully so as to remove the interior parts of birds while keeping feathers as much intact as possible. Because Gould was so skilled at various types of preservation, his specimens show vividly. Organizers of the exhibition wished to suggest that Gould's work was about accuracy in ornithological discovery. Their decision to exhibit both aesthetically pleasing illustrations and the actual specimens collected by Gould was motivated by this desire.

The skins themselves may in fact provide the most remarkable Victorian story of the show. In 1841, Gould brought 322 South Australian specimens back from Australia to England and offered them to the British Museum of Natural History. Subsequently, in 1847, he offered the same museum his entire collection of over 1800 bird skins. When the BMNH refused, he made a similar offer to The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which bought the birds. The American purchase is what enabled the recent show, curated by Philadelphians. Amazingly, the well-preserved birds on display in Washington will make yet another voyage–back to Australia where they will next be shown in Tasmania.

Readers of Victorian Literature and Culture who now find that the deadline for seeing this remarkable show has passed need not entirely despair. The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia has a web-site, http://www.acnatsci.org, which features many of the images on view in Washington.

“Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature,” a show that originated at the Drawing Center in New York City, had a dual purpose. It provided an extensive display of botanical illustrations (over 300 of them). It also focused on different types of early and pre-photographic illustration, including photographs produced without a camera, and highlighted advances in graphic media in the nineteenth century. Visitors to this show were greeted with an anteroom full of artifacts and illustrations to introduce them to early nineteenth-century graphic technologies. Prominent among these were the works of Alois Auer, an Austrian who pioneered in producing “nature prints”–impressions in soft lead made directly from rocks and animals and transferred to paper–and of William Henry Fox Talbot, a Scottish natural historian. In the late 1830s Talbot experimented with what he termed “photogenic drawing”–the use of light and light-sensitive solutions spread on paper, again to produce images from real objects, a technique that led to further developments in photogenesis.

The most spectacular photogenic images arrested the viewer stepping into the larger of the two rooms of the exhibition, where the back wall was covered with blue photograms by Anna Atkins. These photograms, or cyanotypes, were made by placing specimens on chemically treated paper and exposing them to the sun, a process refined by Sir John Herschel, the noted astronomer and friend of Atkins, and still used today in the production of blueprints. The wall of Atkins's cyanotypes affected this viewer like a plunge into a royal blue sea, floating with seaweed transformed into “ocean flowers” (Figure 25). It held fourteen rows of pictures, neatly hung with five vertical prints per row. Non-diving Victorianists might imagine it as a wall replete with pictures, rather like a nineteenth-century Royal Academy show. Atkins produced three volumes of such images in the first natural history books to be illustrated by this early form of photography, Photographs of British Algae (1843–53). All three of the rare volumes were on display in “Ocean Flowers.” The many kinds of photo-reproduction in this show remind us that in early Victorian times, there was a desire to let nature describe itself that flourished through new photographical technologies alongside the desire to draw nature in more traditional ways.

Anna Atkins, Ulva latissima, from Photographs of British Algae, c. 1850. Cyanotype, 26×21 cm. Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove.

The rest of the larger room in the Drawing Center was artfully arranged, the two lateral walls showing colorful prints of botanical specimens from the British Empire. Most interesting to this student of Victorian culture were the drawings by Indian artists (mainly anonymous) hung in juxtaposition to some of those by British artists. The former took their taste for miniatures, with their bright colors and stylized representations, into their renderings of larger, botanical drawings. The result was intricate and artfully posed objects that contrast with European styles. On the right wall were two large, colorful, 1851 British pictures that drew viewers like magnets. Both were depictions of the Victoria regia, the famous water platter (a water lily with enormous spiny pads) named for the Queen, and both were rendered by Walter Fitch, a leading artist for Joseph Hooker at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. At one and the same time intricate, artful, and accurate, they spoke authority. All of the parts of the regia are rendered with utmost care in the one picture, while a spectacular open lily is represented in the other.

The whole of the exhibition was, of course, a tribute to what has been called “the heyday of natural history,” that time from the 1830s to the 1860s when people were engaged in natural history crazes like “pteridomania” (a madness for ferns). To demonstrate this trend, the show featured remarkable vitrines full of the kinds of illustrated natural history books used by enthusiasts hungry to learn more about nature. Most of these date from mid-century, a time when brightly colored pictures were in vogue. Among those featured were Philip Henry Gosse's Naturalist's Rambles of the Devonshire Coast (1853), open to an exquisite chromolithograph, a type of illustration produced with from three to fifteen colors, each having its own lithographic stone. Collectors of such popular books–and I confess an interest here–could see works by Agnes Catlow, the Reverend J. G. Wood, Isabella Gifford, Mary Howard, and other well-known writers of popular natural history. Later natural history books, dating from the last quarter of the century, were illustrated differently, once machinery was available to render multiple black-and-white illustrations at lesser cost. Viewing the books in the show, one might rue the loss of color in favor of a greater profusion of plates. In the case of natural history, aesthetics seem to have fallen victim to mass production and more widespread attempts at scientific education.

Vivid and alluring, “Ocean Flowers” certainly boasted something for nearly every Victorianist–those with special interests in natural history, those who collect Victorian prints, those interested in Victorian book illustration, those with an interest in early forms of photography, and those who simply like to see nineteenth-century objects beautifully rendered and displayed. Works of the famous, like Julia Margaret Cameron's albumen photogram from My Printing of Ferns (c. 1862), were represented, but the overall effect of the show was to demonstrate both how, and how artfully, nature was redrawn at a time when natural history and an enthusiasm for new visual technologies were of utmost importance. Accompanying “Ocean Flowers” is a large and comely catalogue, with essays by the organizers of the show and several other expert contributors. It has been finely reproduced by the Drawing Center and Princeton University Press with a format that echoes the display of the objects at the Center.

Why, one might wonder, all this interest in Victorian natural history over the past several years? Why so many shows appearing at nearly the same time? Aesthetically, their objects are justly beautiful, worthy of multiple viewings. And books like David Allen's, Ann B. Shteir's, Jim Secord's, and my own have, for several decades, pointed to the importance of Victorian natural history, attempting to whet Victorianists' appetites for further study in this area. But I believe there is more to all this than a revival of scholarly interest. The natural world that was new to the Victorians was fuller of species and the Victorian sensibility more robust in its love for nature than is ours. Innumerable bird skins, pressed plants, and rocks gathered by Victorian hands reveal a world of plenty. Scientists like Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, and Joseph Hooker drew ordinary Victorians' attention to the world's diversity and relied on keen and careful amateurs to help fill in data for their theories and catalogues. Natural history clubs sprang up all over the United Kingdom as people combed field and stream for specimens.

As species disappear daily, as many of us become more aware that we may never have the privilege of witnessing what the Victorians saw, our nostalgia for lost worlds seems to increase. Moreover, this is nostalgia not just for lost species, but for another time and place, and for the exuberance with which the Victorians embraced the living world. Today we can reproduce the natural world with seeming ease, but images of once-living specimens in hand-rendered and field-drawn reproductions have an allure that reveals hands-on searching, cataloging, and an adventurer's kind of Victorian excitement. Despite the recent revival of interest in bird watching in America, few of us are afflicted with pteridomania these days. Nevertheless, those who love the natural world can return to a vibrant view of it through these two remarkable displays of Victorian natural history.