William Bartram's Visual Wonders - (Drue Heinz Literature Prize) by Elizabeth A Athens (Hardcover)

About the Book

Positions Bartram's Illustrations as Central to His Understanding of the Natural World

Book 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.

Review Quotes

Beautifully written and deeply researched, William Bartram's Visual Wonders presents a close reading of Bartram's natural history illustrations and place in the transatlantic world of botanical exchange and knowledge formation.--Romita Ray, Syracuse University

Through exquisite formal analyses of Bartram's drawings, coupled with rich historical considerations of his place in the tradition of botanical illustration and Enlightenment visual culture more broadly, this fascinating book connects Bartram's innovative drawing practice to the development of his unique and startlingly modern perspective on the natural world.--Christopher Iannini, Rutgers University

About the Author

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.