Philip Henry Gosse: Science and Art in Letters From Alabama and Entomologia Alabamensis (review)

This book provides a historical sketch of Philip Henry Gosse, a talented English naturalist, artist, and writer who lived from 1810 to 1888, and includes forty-nine full-color plates of insects. Gosse, who was perhaps best known for his studies of marine biology, wrote more than forty books and 270 papers about a wide variety of subjects ranging from plants and insects to religion. The authors were especially interested in the period when Gosse spent eight months in Dallas County in 1838 illustrating insects and studying the natural history of the Black Belt prairie region. Although the text portion of the book is brief—only twenty-nine pages—it is a wonderful prologue to the plates, which are ultimately the heart of the book. The biography, coupled with the life-sized, carefully rendered paintings of insects and plants found in Alabama, give the reader a glimpse of the natural history of the region in the early 1800s as illustrated by an accomplished naturalist and artist.

The book begins with a brief biography of Gosse, focusing on his formative years in England where he began what was to be a lifelong pursuit of the study of nature. Gosse learned the art of painting and drawing in miniature from his father, Thomas, who was an accomplished painter of miniature portraits. Philip Henry's love and study of nature, however, was fostered by his aunt, Susan Bell. These two interests, art and science, shaped Gosse into the methodical naturalist he later became.

At the age of seventeen, Gosse moved to Newfoundland, where he worked as a clerk for eight years. While there, he studied insects in earnest and prepared a sketchbook that included paintings of more than 230 species of insects in the region. Also during this time Gosse "developed a strong spiritual leaning" (p. 2), which would greatly influence his life. He subsequently moved to Compton in southern Quebec, Canada, where he unsuccessfully attempted farming for three years.

Gosse left Canada for a variety of reasons, including poor health, and moved to Philadelphia, the center of American natural history at that time. After meeting the eminent conchologist Timothy Conrad in 1838, he was offered an opportunity to collect marine fossils in Monroe County, Alabama. En route, a judge offered Gosse employment as a schoolteacher in Dallas County. Thus began his eight-month sojourn in the Deep South. During this time, Gosse studied the natural history of the Black Belt prairie region and produced the plates included in this book.

The authors chronicle Gosse's life in Alabama from his Letters from Alabama and Entomologia Alabamensis. It seems extraordinary that he could have accomplished so much in such a short time. In fact, Gosse would have likely stayed longer, but could not reconcile himself to live in an area where slavery was still practiced. He abruptly left Alabama and returned to England after just eight months. The authors include information about his subsequent life but direct much of the ensuing text to documenting his time in Alabama and to describing the mental and artistic processes that went into illustrating the plates.

This book will appeal to anyone interested in the natural history of Alabama as well as appreciators of beautiful art. The authors went to great efforts to reproduce the previously unpublished illustrations from Gosse's sketchbook as accurately as possible. Some of the sketchbook pages were obviously unfinished, and fortunately the authors reproduced them in this same state. These "unfinished" plates allow the viewer to follow Gosse's artistic process from sketch to painting. They also reveal the abruptness of Gosse's departure from Alabama, for surely he would have completed these paintings otherwise. The paintings depicted species characteristic of the Black Belt and were so accurately rendered that experts can still identify most of them to the species level. Even though most...