- Museum number
- SL,5275.80
- Description
-
Toucan, with red and yellow bill and black body, from an album entitled 'Merian's Drawings of Surinam Insects &c'; holding a small bird in its mouth
Watercolour, strengthened with gum, and bodycolour, on vellum
- Production date
- 1701-1705 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 285 millimetres
-
Width: 383 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Entry from J.Harvey's commentary to the Folio Society facsimile of the Surinam Album (London, 2006):
'This watercolour depicts the White-throated Toucan, Ramphastos tucanus (Linnaeus). The bird is shown with its head turned back, so that the image fits onto the vellum sheet. This dramatic watercolour has a number of inaccuracies. There should be an area of bare sky-blue skin around the eye and the pink patch at the base of the bill should also be blue; its feet are far too large.
This large bird is found in Surinam had a distinctive call which is heard in forest area. The image of a Toucan eating a small bird is fanciful as this bird has a diet of fruit and berries, occasionally eating insects, lizards and other birds’ eggs.'
Label text from 2024-25, Oct-Feb British Museum exhibition, 'Hew Locke: what have we here?':
Colonial Suriname
After the Dutch colonised Suriname, the German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian and her daughter Dorothea Graff travelled there independently in 1699, an unusual journey for women at the time. Assisted by enslaved people, they recorded Indigenous names and uses for plants and animals. Locke has chosen these works because 'these drawings are beautiful, but have a perverse, violent side to them.' A century later, John Gabriel Stedman, a Dutch-Scottish soldier sent to put down an uprising of enslaved people against plantation owners, described the violent scenes he witnessed.
Drawing from nature
These botanical and zoological drawings were seen as groundbreaking for their careful observation, artful composition, and contributions to natural science, exploring the interaction between predator and prey. The artists often relied on the knowledge and assistance of enslaved African and local Indigenous people, who laboured under horrifying conditions on Dutch sugar plantations.
Publication text, Hew Locke:
"These objects are grouped together because they demonstrate artists’ responses to life under colonialism (pp.116–17). I saw a television programme about forgotten women artists and one of them was Maria Sibylla Merian. I always thought – how could she have been forgotten? Well, we all know. But I thought the images were extraordinary. They seem to be made up of many different studies from life but also stories that have been told to her: 'this bird did this. I once saw a toucan eating a bird.' But Merian was in Dutch Guiana (Suriname) when it was a slave colony. To me, the images are metaphors for what was going on there – the crocodile eating the snake, the toucan eating the bird.
On the other hand, Blake’s images from Stedman's book are very famous, especially the ones I use in my own work of enslaved people being punished. But they’re all poetic pictures of struggles. Blake’s image of an enslaved person with a hook through his ribs has been reproduced many times. It's like the graphic of the Brooks ship. I’m trying to find a fresh way of processing this situation. I’ve chosen not to show explicit images of brutality, though they do exist. Other artists of colour feel the same about not wanting to see broken Black bodies. Imagination is a powerful thing. We need to think about what was happening there. It's a really brutal system and it's perverse to make it look pretty. Plantation owners have power of life and death over their subjects, they can do what they want – and they did. The image of a dead man I've included shows someone who tried to resist. They failed, but you have to try – the alternative was unthinkable. I have placed it with the images painted by Merian and her daughter because I find the contrast interesting. These women accepted the situation they were in. They didn’t approve of slavery but they didn’t resist it. They came from Amsterdam to an extreme society and they must have witnessed the extremes of punishment. It doesn’t take a psychologist to examine this work and see it as a metaphor for what they’re seeing – well, I think so anyway."
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2024-2025, 17 Oct–9 Feb, London, BM, G35, 'Hew Locke: what have we here?'
- Acquisition date
- 1753
- Acquisition notes
- Transferred to P&D 11 March 1885 (see note on fly-leaf of album SL,5275.1-91). Transferred from the Department of Manuscripts.
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- SL,5275.80
- Additional IDs
-
Miscellaneous number: N,01.80
