The women who drew the natural world

Within the Library and Archives, we hold artworks by over a hundred female illustrators from the 1600s to the present day.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this project combined archival research with contemporary artistic practice to focus on three artists, Sarah Stone (1760-1844), Sarah Bowdich Lee (1791-1856), and Elizabeth Gould (1804-1841).

The project Beyond Botany

Funding from the AHRC’s Impact Accelerator Award enabled Isobel and Carol to undertake a project titled Beyond Botany, which sought to reinsert women natural history artists into historical narratives and to better understand the labour, expertise, and scientific significance of their contributions to natural history illustration.

Bird illustration was not as common as botanical illustration during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. This is because botany was potentially more accessible and was often framed as an extension of domestic hobbies, such as gardening, painting, and flower arranging, and allowed girls and women to engage in scientific study from home without needing formal education.

The artists chosen for study in this project were all producing drawings that became crucial evidence in taxonomic classification and its communication to both scientific and general audiences. Sometimes these artists would not have seen the live subjects of their compositions, working only from dead specimens collected from ever-expanding global travels or newly colonised territories like Australia.

Artist and researcher Carol Adlam has created new original artworks as part of this project. Drawing inspiration from the life stories of the artists studied, she produced mixed media paintings that highlight the extraordinary skill, labour, and creative achievement of these women, as well as their significant contributions to our understanding of the natural world.

Watercolour wisdom

Sarah Stone was a talented and meticulous artist commissioned to paint specimens in the London-based Leverian Museum (also known as the Holophusikon). This was a natural history collection located on Leicester Square from 1775 to 1786. Stone’s drawings covered a broad scope of mounted birds, insects, mammals, fishes, and lizards, as well as numerous ethnographical artefacts brought back from exploratory voyages, including those of Captain James Cook who led three voyages of exploration to the Pacific and Southern Oceans between 1768 and 1779.

When the museum closed in 1806, most of the specimens were lost, destroyed, or becameuntraced, meaning that Stones’s drawings provide some of the only surviving evidence of a large and important collection. Stone is believed to have produced over 1,000 watercolours between 1777 and 1806. Our Library holds nearly 300 of these.

The Banksian Cockatoo

Isobel also used the library’s artworks collection to explore the contributions of women artists to late eighteenth-century British scientific networks.

By tracing how artists represented and interpreted a single species, the Banksian cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus banksii, she found that illustrators of the time played a vital role in communication about these specimens, which were receiving increasing interest due to improved preservation techniques.

In 1789, for example, Stone and her contemporary, Ann Latham (1772-1835), both produced studies of the Banksian cockatoo that are dated not only by the year and month but also by the day of their production. This suggests a potentially competitive, fast-paced race to publish new species.

Commissioned by two sailors attached to the First Fleet settlement of present-day Sydney, the illustrations are drawn from two different specimens. However, while Latham’s illustration does indeed show a Banksian Cockatoo, also known as Banksian, Stone’s depicts a Glossy Black, Calyptorhynchus lathami, a species not identified until 1807.

Isobel suggests, “Stone’s illustration is actually taken from a mounted specimen contained in Parkinson’s Leverian Museum, listed as a Banksian Cockatoo in the 1806 sales catalogue and currently in the collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna.”

Creative responses

As part of the visual exploration of this project, Carol created a set of watercolour paintings in response to the Museum’s holdings and their wider contexts. “I was inspired by the art of Gould and Stone, echoing their curiosity, their focus on single bird specimens and their jewel-like colours”.

Carol cites textual extracts from Bowdich Lee’s Taxidermy that describe how animals, birds, insects and other specimens were collected, preserved and transported from across the world.

Carol’s art highlights the physical effort required to move specimens from around the world to European collections, as well as colonial power structures and the work of women in this vast undertaking.

Playing with scale, she shows small, ghost-like female figures working together to move oversized specimens, using scaffolding, dry docks, pulleys and winches. Carol’s work also experiments with backlighting to recall the practice of displaying work before electricity, in gaslight, sometimes called transparent illuminations.

Each of these artists explored in Beyond Botany was prolific, although not all were widely known at the time.

In retrospect, the thousands of works they produced were not mere ‘illustrations’, but a key means by which scientific and popular knowledge about the natural world was accumulated, discussed, and circulated in a time of European Imperial exploration.

By highlighting their often-overlooked contributions, sometimes made against the odds, we hope to inspire new generations to bring art and the natural sciences together.

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