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Robert McCracken Peck on Botanically Illustrated Books
November 19, 2024 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm EST
Sponsored by The Grolier Club
Join the Grolier Club for a live webcast as former Grolierite, Robert McCracken Peck, who is Curator of Art and Senior Fellow at The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, lectures on books about the natural world from the 18th and 19th centuries that defied expectations by replicating nature in a tangible way.
The volumes incorporated the organisms themselves into their pages, or, in the case of trees, used the very subjects being discussed to create the books describing them. In what we think of as the “Golden Age” of natural history publications, John James Audubon and James Bateman took their volumes to extremes in size, while Maria Sibylla Merian, Mark Catesby, Pierre Joseph Redoute, Joseph Bloch, John Gould and other naturalist-artists bedazzled contemporaries with illustrations that are still referenced by scientists and sought after by collectors. These publications’ goal was to record and disseminate information about plants and wildlife, and to provide “lifelike” illustrations of flora and fauna.
In this heavily illustrated lecture, Peck will discuss a different approach to scientific illustration: how natural history specimens were used to illustrate themselves in three dimensions in exsiccatae, xylotheks, and lepidochromes. He will also discuss books illustrated with feathers. You won’t want to miss this unusual – and beautiful – presentation about a little-known aspect of scientific book production.