Art for Science's Sake
by Pamela M. Henson
Take the elevator to the sixth floor of the National Museum of Natural History's east wing and you enter another world. In the Department of Entomology, row after row of cases store tiny, often beautiful, six-legged creatures. Step inside the office of Elaine Hodges and Young Sohn, and you will find trays of wasps and bees, microscopes, slides, dissecting tools, and what's this?: carbon pencils, crow quill pens, artist's brushes, scratch board, tracing paper. In many ways, the room looks more like an artist's studio than a scientist's lab. In reality, it's a bit of both. Hodges and Sohn are scientific illustrators who produce the anatomical drawings of insects needed for natural history research and identification of insect pests.
While at first it may seem surprising to find that artists work in a science museum, illustrators have been an important part of our study of the natural world from the days of the cave drawings to today's computer labs, and museums and scientific records would not be the same without them.
Scientists and artists both must have strong visual skills, and that is the tie that binds them. Both are trained to observe carefully, remember and analyze pattern and form, compare shapes and recognize differences. While most artists learn to interpret and alter what they see, scientific illustrators must also master exacting scientific disciplines. But scientific illustrators do not have to check all of their aesthetic skills at the museum door, and their works are often as beautiful as they are informative.
Scientific illustration is the art of producing accurate, precise, and clear representations of specimens and environments important to science. A scientific illustration must capture the natural shape, proportions, and positions of important anatomical features, or "characters" as biologists call them. This is not always an easy task. A museum specimen has often lost the shape and colors it had when it was alive. A antler may be broken off at one end, a petal may be bent or folded, a wing may have dirt specks that cannot be removed without damaging its delicate structure. Using observational skills, scientific knowledge of the organism, and artistic talent, the scientific illustrator must produce a drawing of the organism as it once may have appeared--complete, undamaged, poised for action.
Why not just take a photograph, you might ask? The scientific illustration has some advantages over photography. The lighting of a photograph may distort shape, emulsions may distort color, and the camera cannot fix crumpled, damaged or discolored parts. But an illustration can avoid all of these problems, allowing us to see the shape and anatomical features of a specimen far more clearly.
The scientific illustrator must capture every detail precisely. For instance, an artist drawing a mosquito larva must count and carefully depict the animal's tiny head hairs because this character may tell us whether this specimen is harmless or a potential carrier of serious diseases. The illustrator must produce a drawing that helps the entomologist in the field determine if a pond with larvae must be treated with pesticides or if the mosquitoes living in it can coexist with us peacefully.
Sizing Up Subjects
Scientific illustrators must all produce drawings that fit on a printed page and are visible to the naked eye. This means they must enlarge the smallest and reduce the largest of the creatures they study. For example, an illustrator working on a triceratops skull reduces its size to fit on a page using a caliper or proportion divider to measure and outline the skull. This painstaking work results in a drawing that is smaller but retains the correct proportions.
How does the illustrator enlarge a tiny creature? Look again at Hodges' desk and you'll see her microscope doesn't look like the one you used in biology class. As Hodges explains, "This is a camera lucida, a device that projects the image seen through the microscope onto a paper next to the microscope. The illustrator looks at the specimen through the microscope and then traces its shape on to the paper." By using the camera lucida, Hodges and other artists can be sure that the animal's basic shape and its proportions are correct.
The artist also looks at the organism from many angles and produces drawings of many different pieces. The pieces are then enlarged and combined into a single drawing, which is reviewed by the scientist for accuracy. "Only after both artist and scientist are satisfied with the preliminary image is the final drawing produced," says Hodges.
Most scientific illustration is done in black and white, partly because few scientific journals can afford the expense of color. Black and white drawings also allow the scientists to easily compare anatomical features. Today's illustrators use a variety of media and techniques, ranging from scratch board, carbon dust, pen and ink drawings, and watercolors to three-dimensional computer graphics. Scientific illustrators don't just work inside museums, however, and they don't just produce drawings for scientific journals. Field drawings of plants, animals, and natural environments are an important part of scientific work. The field artist quickly sketches the many postures and movements of the organism, carefully recording its living shape and natural colors before the specimen is preserved. Nearby, a scientist records observations, such as where the specimen is found and by whom, and whether it is rare or abundant. Field notes, photographs, and drawings help make a museum specimen valuable.
Picturing a New World
Drawings have been an important part of field work for centuries. After the discovery of the New World, scientists were eager to learn about the unusual creatures explorers had found. They wished to describe these new species and classify them in the grand Systema Natura or system of nature proposed by Swedish taxonomy pioneer Carolus Linnaeus in the seventeenth century. All a scientist might have to work with was a field sketch, some hurried notes, and perhaps one damaged and desiccated specimen.
European scientists eagerly sought specimens, descriptions, and drawings of new species of plant and animals, and dedicated artists stepped up to meet their demands. One entrepreneurial artist was John Abbot (1751-c.1840), who left England and settled in the New World in 1773. Living first in Virginia and then in Georgia, Abbot supported himself by recording the birds and insects around him in watercolors and selling his paintings to wealthy patrons back in England. He sent thousands of his drawings and specimens back to his homeland where they were studied by naturalists and reproduced in scientific volumes. Abbot's watercolors may seem primitive in comparison to the work of some of his European colleagues, but for naturalists they provided a precious window through which people back in Europe could glimpse a new world of nature.
After the turn of the century, the flora and fauna of the New World became familiar to lovers of science and art alike through the work of John James Audubon (1785-1851). Audubon took up paintbrush in 1819 after a series of business failures along the western frontier. He set about capturing in watercolor and pastel the animals he observed and hunted in North America. In 1826 Audubon crossed the Atlantic again, this time to begin an ambitious multi-volume printing of his drawings. He personally oversaw the engraving, coloring, and publishing of his plates, ensuring that his name would not be lost to obscurity in a European publication.
Part showman, part naturalist, part artist, Audubon cultivated his image as a frontiersman, and courted wealthy patrons. Audubon's dramatic portrayals of American wildlife departed from previous work by telling a story about the animals. Audubon's birds particularly caught the imagination of his European audience. Most birds were dramatically depicted, shown defending their nests, feeding on corn or berries, clutching prey in their claws, and in other poses. Many of Audubon's works seem to borrow more from the tradition of game paintings than scientific illustration. In his day, neither the art nor the scientific community was entirely comfortable calling him their own. But a century and a half after publication of Audubon's Birds of America, he continues to influence artists.
An American Science
While Audubon was preparing his lavish plates primarily for a European audience, American naturalists and politicians felt the need to establish American independence from European in scientific matters. When the United States sent out its first global exploring expedition from 1838 to 1842 under the command of Lt. Charles Wilkes, it included a staff of naturalists and artists to assist them. The talented artist-explorers of the United States Exploring Expedition produced hundreds of drawings of distant cultures, foreign landscapes, and exotic plants and animals from the far reaches of the globe. Joseph Drayton (died 1856), an experienced engraver from Philadelphia and one of the artists sent on the voyage, produced quick field sketches that captured the living colors and shapes of tiny mollusks, jellyfish, fish, and frogs. To save time in the field, Drayton often sketched the outlines of the whole animal but colored only a small part as an example. His field sketches and notes were used by John H. Richard to produce the magnificent plates for the expedition's Herpetology. The expedition's multi-volume report went a long way toward bringing the scientific standards of the United States up to par with those of Europe.
Go West, Young Man
All through the nineteenth century, private and government exploring parties surveyed and mapped the North American frontier as they moved farther and farther west. Artists and photographers sent along on these expeditions captured the magnificent vistas and geological formations of the West, providing the world its first glimpses of the Rockies, the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone. Some survey artists mastered the new art of photography as well to capture these new vistas, but photographs could not fully capture the depth or complex relationships between features in a western panorama.
The West was also rich in the remains of ancient and extinct creatures of great interest to science. Expedition artists sketched the strange fossilized creatures found in rock outcroppings and uncovered below the surface. Fielding B. Meek (1817-1876) accompanied several of the Hayden expeditions to Missouri and the badlands of Nebraska. Equally talented as an artist and paleontologist, Meek both wrote the text and prepared the plates for United States Geological Survey reports. Meek's carefully crafted plates show the entire animal as well as cross-sections and anatomical details. Many of Meek's plates were produced while he was living in the Smithsonian Castle on the Mall, one of a group of young explorers who quartered there while not in the field.
Showing Us the Beauty in Nature
The fossil beds of Canada later drew paleontologists such as Charles Doolittle Walcott to the northern Rockies. First as head of the U. S. Geological Survey and later as the fourth Secretary of the Smithsonian, Walcott travelled north annually to collect an array of strange creatures, unlike any ever seen before, in the Burgess Shale formations. His wife, Mary Vaux Walcott (1860-1940), assisted him in the field, but also turned her artistic eyes to other life forms: wildflowers. Their field tent became her atelier, as she captured natural colors and shapes while still in the field. In 1925, her Wild-Flowers of North America, a five-volume set of prints from her original watercolors, was published by the Smithsonian using a new printing process designed to produce large runs of high quality prints. The 400 plates captured the beauty of our native flora, from sweet pea to rose, and awakened interest in these beautiful plants among another generation of plant collectors.
Mary Agnes Chase, a botanist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from 1903 to 1963, used her talents to educate the public about her favorite group of plants, grasses. Chase began her career as a scientific illustrator, a route she and many other women used to enter the science community. Chase studied on her own at night, and became honorary curator of the National Herbarium and the world's expert on grasses. Much of her work for the USDA was practical--identifying seeds to ensure that agricultural products were of high quality and describing and classifying new species. Chase was passionate about grasses, and she shared her love of these common but highly diverse plants in her First Book of Grasses, designed not for the scientist but for the amateur botanist who could find examples in every field and yard they wandered through. First published in 1922, her First Book of Grasses remains in print today.
Over the years, scientific illustrators have been called upon to provide field guides for more than the weekend naturalist. During World War II, illustrators helped to prepare Survival on Land and Sea, a pocket-sized manual distributed to a million servicemen to help them survive if they were downed or separated from their units on foreign soil. This tradition has continued on in the form of flash cards, which are illustrated with paintings of animals to show which are dangerous and which may be useful and plant diagrams that warn of poisonous parts, point out edible portions, and identify sources of life-sustaining fluids. For these identification aids, illustrators must produce an image that a non-scientist can understand and use. The drawing of parts must be clear and simple, but must also be precise to avoid confusing similar species in cases where one is poisonous and another is edible.
Today's illustrators have many more tools available to produce and disseminate their drawings, while computer technology makes many images easily accessible. A CD-ROM on the fruit fly, for example, contains hundreds of drawings of this agriculturally important pest that inspectors can use when checking plant shipments. Computer technology is also allowing us to look at organisms in a new way. Three-dimensional scanning technology now allows illustrators to build multi-dimensional models of animals and plants, images that can be rotated and viewed from many angles.
But whether artists use ink on paper or a computer mouse, the basic challenges of scientific illustration remain the same--to produce clear, accurate and well-composed images of life forms. As scientists continue to explore the biological diversity of the tropics and examine minute characters visible through high-powered microscopy, scientific illustrators will be there to help scientists and the general public see the natural world through their artists' eyes.
Pamela M. Henson is a historian at the Institutional History Division Office of the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
(ZooGoer 25(5) 1996. Copyright 1996 Pamela M. Henson. All rights reserved.)
