Drawing Insects: John Abbot and the Arts of Noticing

Enlightenment natural history with its collecting, describing, drawing, cataloging, and classifying of specimens has been critiqued within ecocriticism and environmental studies as naively empiricist, as part of an imperialist project, and as engaged in commoditization of the natural world. However, to brush aside natural history's practices of collection, representation, and classification is to dismiss the possibility that within these practices are ways of noticing the natural world that could contribute much to developing the attentiveness necessary to counter the political and economic forces bent on the unsustainable exploitation and consumption of the natural world. This essay offers the insect drawings of John Abbot (1751-1840) as an example of how the material practices of drawing, even those conjoined to Linnaean systematics, were deeply attentive ways of relating to the natural world. Abbot, an English naturalist artist, drew over 6,000 watercolor drawings of North American birds and insects, the majority of which are single sheet watercolors of moths, wasps, dragonflies, beetles, spiders, and other arthropods. These drawings, designed to aid in the identification and classification of insects, contain traces of Abbot's attentiveness, even respect for the otherness of these non-human subjects. Abbot's entomological portraits possess the hallmarks of the arts of noticing: an intense engagement and visual encounter with a chronically overlooked part of the natural world.