William Bartram's Visual Wonders: The Drawings of an American Naturalist - Couverture souple

Athens, Elizabeth A.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0822967618 ISBN 13 : 9780822967613

Editeur : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025

Synopsis

Winner, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia 2024 Literary Award for Nonfiction Pennsylvania naturalist William Bartram (1739–1823) is best known as the author of a travelogue describing his botanizing journey through the American South in the late eighteenth century. Writing was not, however, Bartram’s only or even preferred method of recording the natural world around him. His deeply unconventional drawings, depicting sentient plants and hybrid organic forms, lie at the heart of his understanding of nature. With this book, Elizabeth Athens considers the strangeness of Bartram’s graphic enterprise, exploring the essential role his renderings played in his natural history. For Bartram, the making and interpretation of figures on a surface was a dynamic and collaborative relationship between nature, the observing artist-naturalist, and the audience. This book offers the first in-depth investigation of Bartram’s drawing practice as central to his understanding of nature. Through an examination of Bartram’s approach to botanical and zoological representation, Athens highlights the struggle between different modes of seeing nature in eighteenth-century Enlightenment science.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Elizabeth Athens is an art historian and curator based at the University of Connecticut. She has written extensively on the overlap of the arts and sciences in British North America and the United States, with a special focus on the visual and material culture of natural history. She has also been recognized nationally and internationally for her reinterpretation of the portrait galleries at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, which holds one of the most important collections of early American portraiture.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0822967618
• ISBN 13: 9780822967613
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 296
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible