Henrietta Mcburney

The life and art of the 18th-century naturalist Mark Catesby, and his pioneering work depicting the flora and fauna of North America, are explored in vibrant detail This book explores the life and work of the celebrated eighteenth-century English naturalist, explorer, artist and author Mark Catesby (1683–1749). During Catesby’s lifetime, science was poised to shift from a world of amateur virtuosi to one of professional experts. Working against a backdrop of global travel that incorporated collecting and direct observation of nature, Catesby spent two prolonged periods in the New World – in Virginia (1712–19) and South Carolina and the Bahamas (1722–6). In his majestic two-volume Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–43), esteemed by his contemporary John Bartram as ‘an ornament for the finest library in the world’, he reflected the excitement, drama and beauty of the natural world. Interweaving elements of art history, history of science, natural history illustration, painting materials, book history, paper studies, garden history and colonial history, this meticulously researched volume brings together a wealth of unpublished images as well as newly discovered letters by Catesby, which, with their first-hand accounts of his collecting and encounters in the wild, bring the story of this extraordinary pioneer naturalist vividly to life. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This catalogue brings together some of the finest natural history drawings executed for Cassiano, including 251 coloured drawings of fauna, and 63 of gems, marbles, fossils and other natural curiosities. Cassiano had a particular interest in ornithology, and birds are thus the best-represented members of the animal kingdom in this group, with more than 200 drawings of both native and exotic species. Other drawings of fauna catalogued here include mammals, fishes and crustaceans. Like the bird drawings, many are drawn with painstaking attention to detail and scale, a complete specimen drawn on a reduced scale to fit the sheet, with anatomical details depicted life size. The drawings of mineral specimens and other natural curiosities depict the sort of item commonly found in seventeenth-century collectors' cabinets: gemstones, bezoars, marbles, corals, 'Lucifer' stones, fossils, exotic seeds and beans, as well as scientific instruments.