Learning from the past

Naturalists in the 18th century documented a far different world than the one we inhabit today. Art and science were co-dependent, and in order to accurately depict a plant or animal species, a naturalist had to be both a keen observationalist and a talented, creative artist. They were also communicating to a society that placed a far different value on wild animals and plants than we do today, spending painstaking hours illustrating species that would later be driven to extinction due to over-hunting and habitat destruction.  

While the environment and the field of natural science have changed since the colonial era, revisiting that world, and the insights of the pioneering naturalists who sought to understand it, can offer scholars of art history, natural history, and similar fields fresh perspectives on how to approach modern topics and issues related to nature.  

Metamorphosis, Merian.

We are excited to help facilitate such research by offering a new, project-based research course using materials from two of history’s most impactful naturalists and artists: Mark Catesby and Maria Sibylla Merian. While they may not be household names, both Catesby and Merian’s careful reproductions of natural organisms shaped the way subsequent scientists studied the environment, including luminaries such as James John Audobon and Charles Darwin. The Oak Spring library houses first edition works from both Catesby and Merian, which will be used as a departure point in the course.

OSGF has explored the life and work of Maria Sibylla Merian, an extraordinary, German-born artist and naturalist who is particularly notable for her contributions to entomology, at length: we hosted a Facebook live event on Merian’s birthday last April with Merian scholar Kay Etheridge. Etheridge is one of the leaders of the upcoming Pioneers of Natural History course, along with Mark Catesby scholar Henrietta McBurney Ryan. To view the Facebook live broadcast about Merian, please click on the image below.  

Maria Sibylla Merian Facebook Live

Like Merian, English naturalist Catesby was also a remarkable artist and scientist who drifted into relative obscurity over the course of history. Scroll down to learn about his life, and flip through the slideshows to view images from his monumental Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.

Mark Catesby (1682-1749)

The cover page of the first volume of Catesby’s Natural History. The first volume primarily consisted of birds and trees.

The volume starts with a map of the regions Catesby catalogued , including “part of Virginia.”

“Largest white-billed woodpecker and the Willow-Oak.” Ivory-billed woodpeckers are listed as federally endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“The Parrot of Carolina and Cypress of America.” The last Carolina Parakeet died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918.

“The red-wing’d starling and the broad-leaved Candle-berry myrtle.” Now known as the red-winged blackbird, they are found throughout the U.S.

“The Parrot of Paradise of Cuba and the red-wood.” Catesby wrote that this drawing was based on a dead specimen, that had been captured in Cuba and later gifted to “a Gentlewoman of Carolina” as a pet. Some researchers believe it could have been a now extinct subspecies of Cuban Amazon parrot.

Few people have made a more significant impact on the study of natural history in the United States than Mark Catesby. He was the first person to publish a public record of the plant and animal species in what was known to Europeans as “the new world”: his two-volume Natural History catalogue, a life-long work born produced over decades of travel in the Bahamas and the Southeastern United States. 

“For as every Bird have gestures peculiar to them, it is requisite they should be drawn from living Birds, otherwise it is impossible to give them their natural air. ”

— -Mark Catesby, on the importance of drawing from life (Natural History, vol. I.)

Catesby was a revolutionary naturalist in many ways. Aside from being the first to document the biodiversity of a country thought by many to be new and strange, he was also one of the first naturalists to sketch live animals in the field instead of dead ones that had been stuffed and posed, to discover that birds migrate (detailed in a paper he presented in London titled “Of birds of passage,”) and to recognize the symbiotic relationship between animals and the plants in their habitats. Many of the 220 etchings he produced for Natural History, based on his drawings and watercolors, feature animal and plant species arranged together against white backgrounds to show these relationships, much like Audubon would do a hundred years later as he catalogued America’s bird species.

“Bison Americanus and Pseudo Acacia” from the second volume of Natural History , which primarily featured mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. Catesby wrote in a 1723 letter that he first observed bison in the Carolina Piedmont. They had disappeared from the state by 1763.

“The Great Hog Fish.” “The tail of this fish being cut off before I had it, I cannot say what form it was,” wrote Catesby.

“The Great Horned caterpillar and the pigeon plumb.”

“The Ribbon Snake and Winter’s Bark.” Catesby wrote, “they are very nimble and inoffensive.”

“The Java Hare.” Occasionally, Catesby would include non-native species he came across in his Natural History. Although he wrote that this animal was native to Java and Sumatra ( “this was in possession of his Grace the Duke of Richmond, who was pleased to think it worth a place in the collection,”) it is actually a Brazilian Agouti.

Despite these achievements, not much is known about Catesby’s life. He was born in Suffolk to a moderately wealthy family, and likely first became interested in natural history due to his friendship with contemporary British naturalists, such as John Ray. Catesby first traveled to America in 1712 at age 29 with his sister, and lived in Williamsburg, VA for several years as he collected plant and animal specimens to bring back to England. He received financial backing to return to the new world in 1722, where he continued continue documenting the continent’s flora and fauna from his base in Charleston, South Carolina, publishing his Natural History in segments to subscribers curious about the new world. The two completed volumes were released in 1732 and 1743.  

Catesby died in 1749 in London, his grave now lost. Editions of a third natural history volume on America’s trees, Hortus Europae Americanus, was published posthumously in the 1760s.   

Some of the illustrations in Catesby’s Natural History were done by collaborators. The second volume of Natural History features a magnolia grandiflora illustration by German botanist Georg Dionysius Ehret. The accompanying black and white insert - which very few editions of Natural History contain - was from Christopher Gray’s A catalogue of American trees and shrubs that will endure the climate of England (c. 1740)

Catesby’s legacy lives on in the Oak Spring Garden Library, which holds both Natural History volumes and Hortus Europae Americanus. His vibrant illustrations and observations of American wildlife - some, like the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, which have all but vanished since America’s colonization - stand as a reminder for modern researchers to strive to protect what Catesby so carefully captured hundreds of years before.*

To learn more about the Oak Spring Library Collection, please visit https://www.osgf.org/library.

*To learn more about OSGF’s efforts to protect native bird species - many of which Catesby observed during his time in Virginia - please read this recent blog post on our landscape restoration projects.

Additional sources:

MacBurney, Henrietta, and Amy R. W. Meyers. Mark Catesby’s Natural History of America: the Watercolors from the Royal Library Windsor Castle. M. Holberton, 1997.

Nelson, Charles E., et al. The Curious Mister Catesby: a "Truly Ingenious" Naturalist Explores New Worlds. University of Georgia Press, 2015.