Hailed as America’s first great naturalist William Bartram, in a book more commonly known as “Bartram’s Travels,” lays out a vision of the landscape of the American South as Bartram experienced it during his botanizing expedition from 1773 until his return to his Philadelphia home early in 1777. His vivid writing describes the plants and animals of southern ecosystems as well as describing the Native peoples whose deep ecological knowledge he relied upon. “Travels” has been reprinted repeatedly since its first publication in 1791 and remains a snapshot in time for those interested in visualizing through Bartram’s words the nature of the colonial southern landscape. Testament to Bartram’s central appeal is the fact that the online bibliography WorldCat reveals 2,728 citations of him. As we mark the 250th anniversary of William Bartram’s sojourn in the South, the question may be: What is left to be said?Elizabeth A. Athens answers that question in her engaging examination of his graphic work in William Bartram’s Visual Wonders: The Drawings of an American Naturalist. Athens links Bartram’s writings directly to his drawing practice, which began in his early teen years and continued until his vision began to fail him in his sixties. While the influence “Travels” had on American and European authors is well known, Athens’s book traces the importance of the act of illustration in Bartram’s work—the focus that drawing requires to accurately render all the aspects of a plant or animal on paper. Equally important for Bartram was the act of conveying his subject’s behavior, which for Bartram included not only the obvious behavior of animals but also plants. As Athens describes it, Bartram’s emphasis on illustration would move him “from matter toward thought and imagination” (8).Early in the text Athens emphasizes the profound influence on Bartram of William Hogarth’s book The Analysis of Beauty (9). Hogarth set out a framework to better reflect the fluidity, mutability, and flexibility of the living world, especially using what he called “the serpentine line” (9). Bartram wholeheartedly embraced this approach as can be seen in the illustrations included in this book. With the author’s guidance, the reader can appreciate the dynamic experience Bartram was trying to facilitate, and not just through the use of vision. Unlike other of his contemporary naturalist-artists who often were working only with dried pressed plants and animal skins, Bartram’s illustrations convey movement, tension, and even the other senses, such as the feel of an alligator’s skin and the taste suggested by an edible lotus seed.Athens also skillfully blends into the text the response of the audience intended for much of Bartram’s scientific and artistic work. European learned societies (particularly the Royal Society) and European taxonomists were trying to make novel American plants and animals fit into received scientific hierarchies. Of course, the vast majority of these people never saw the North American flora and fauna for themselves. Despite the emergence of colonial intellectual power—particularly in Philadelphia—the Europeans generally viewed the colonists as “unsophisticated countryfolk . . . incapable of making sense of the wilderness they inhabited” (12).The rigid hierarchy of species championed by Linnaeus, which emphasized structural anatomy, left no room for the consideration of multiple structural forms within the same species, much less for plant and animal behavior and interrelationships. This scientific approach is reflected in the art of naturalists such as Mark Catesby. Although Catesby did have the opportunity to collect specimens from a wide variety of sites in America and the Caribbean, his plant illustrations appear particularly flattened, evidently drawn from pressed herbarium specimens rather than from life. Catesby includes livelier animals in some of his plates. However, many of these animals often occurred in completely different locations than the plants with which they are paired.The savants who favored rigid hierarchies were wrestling with the introduction of the microscope. This invention challenged the long-held concept of “The Great Chain of Being” via microscopy’s stunning revelation of microorganisms swarming by the millions within a single drop of pond water. As Athens notes, “Bartram’s graphic approach arrived precisely at the right time to provide images of flora and fauna that were as lively and dynamic as nature itself” (15).Fortunately, Bartram did not abandon his approach to conveying American flora and fauna on the altar of what was then perceived as scientific accuracy. Pairing selected illustrations displaying Bartram’s energetic written descriptions with her art-historical analysis, Athens underscores the dynamism of both Bartram’s art and his writing. According to the author, her aim is “fundamentally to alter our understanding of his drawings and their strangeness, while also highlighting the contested terrain of scientific visualization in the eighteenth century” (20).Once Bartram returned to Philadelphia in 1777, he probably did not stray for the rest of his life more than five miles from the family garden at Kingsessing. Advancing age kept him from joining the early expeditions into the American West. Instead, he gave much of his time serving as an energetic mentor to the young, emerging scientific community in Philadelphia, earning the moniker “The Philosopher of Kingsessing.” He encouraged this new generation to view nature not simply through their specialized areas of science but “as a series of interconnected relationships” (193). Through his work, Bartram’s combination of science and art played a foundational role in the development of what we know as modern ecological science.Americans are fortunate that Bartram’s Garden still exists. Elizabeth Athens’s book encourages readers to stroll the grounds that nurtured America’s great writer/naturalist. But wherever you find yourself, take out paper and pencil to draw the world as Bartram did, to see it all anew.
Dorinda G. Dallmeyer (Thu,) studied this question.