William Bartram's Visual Wonders - The Botanical Drawings of an American Naturalist

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