Sketching Splendor - by Anna Majeski (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Sketching Splendor examines the work of three American naturalists, William Bartram, Titian Ramsay Peale, and John James Audubon whose work exemplifies innovation and injustice in equal measure. The exhibition draws on the American Philosophical Society's rich holdings as well as select loans, with many objects exhibited together for the first time.

The careers of Bartram, Peale, and Audubon spanned the exciting period from 1750 to 1850, helping to shape the nation's emerging intellectual identity, cataloging species unknown to Euro-Americans, engaging with the nascent concepts of ecology and evolution, as well as developing new techniques to visually and verbally represent the complexity of the natural world. Yet natural history was not an innocent intellectual pursuit, and these three naturalists also supported expansionist agendas dispossessing Native Nations and relied on enslaved labor. Moreover, while the names of Bartram, Peale, and Audubon are commemorated in the historical record, there were many unacknowledged or underacknowledged Native Americans, people of African descent, and women, whose knowledge, labor, and skills made their work possible. These are the two realities that this exhibition engages, teasing out the many ways in which Bartram, Peale, and Audubon relied on and promoted the forces of colonization and plantation slavery, even as it acknowledges points of ambivalence. Their work speaks to the conflicted nature of our nation's early history and the place of natural historians in that complex landscape.

Review Quotes

"The impressive images these naturalists [William Bartram, Titian Ramsey Peale, and John James Audubon] created also helped create a greater awareness of what lay on the American landscape ... At the same time, the naturalists cannot be disentangled from the various 'others--female and male, enslaved and free, Native American, African, and European, ' who helped make the scientific work possible. If these usually unseen participants in the 'collaborative effort' of natural history have suffered from historical 'erasure, ' Sketching Splendor seeks to draw them back into the picture."--Gregory Nobles "Journal of the Early Republic"

About the Author

Anna Majeski received a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2022, where she completed a doctoral dissertation on a remarkable series of astrological fresco cycles completed in Padua between 1300 and 1440. Her research focuses on the intersections of art and science, image and knowledge in the early modern world, and has been supported by pre- and postdoctoral fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. She joined the American Philosophical Society, Library & Museum, as Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Natural History Exhibition Research Fellow in October 2022, where she curated the exhibition Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750-1850. She is currently researching her monograph, Powerful Images: Art and Astrology in Renaissance Italy.