Visualizing Darwinian Evolution

2009 was, by any measure, a banner year for Charles Darwin and Darwin studies. As the four books reviewed here demonstrate, it was also, moreover, a remarkable year for scholarship on the relations of making and knowing in science and art.

Evolutionary science turns out to be a fascinating case study for exploring a variety of topics central to the history of British visual culture, science, and aesthetics. In the roughly half-century that has passed since Victorian Studies published its first Darwin issue in 1959, studies of Darwin have catalyzed several new directions in scholarship. The “visual turn” in the historiography of art, literature, and science and technology studies, for example, as well as the growth of “visual culture” as a conceptual field within art history and the “sociological” turn in the history of science, directed new attention to the study of audiences, visual practices, and material artifacts of knowledge production, sometimes exposing shortcomings in historical interpretations arrived at on the basis of textual sources alone. Gillian Beer, Janet Browne, Lynda Nead, Jonathan Smith, James Secord, and others have given us new ways to think about how visual arts, scientific observation, and representation can serve as guides to the changing definitions of Victorian science and art, the politics and boundaries of scientific meaning and intellectual authority, and the changing role of publicity and science in an age of new media. Studies of scientific illustrations have offered new ways to think about key cultural themes of modern British history, such as the creation of racial and ethnic hierarchies, assumptions about gender, sex and sexuality, and human and animal nature. Investigations into the cultural significance and currency of scientific visualizations that have acquired or lost value in the course of their travels across different scientific and popular domains offer new understandings about the dynamics of social trust in scientific facts as well as the characteristics of knowledge production.¹

In light of the interest—sparked by the recent anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859)—in Darwin’s individual agency in the history of science and art, it is notable that several contributors to books on Darwin, science, and the visual arts have emphasized the social, cultural, and material and practical dimensions of science and scientific understanding. For several of these authors, the achievement of scientific knowledge is shown as more evidently a collective accomplishment whose significance goes far beyond what can be grasped by and justified to an individual knower, embedded in concrete practices, institutions, and material settings. The four books reviewed here offer substantial evidence that the visual arts influenced Darwin’s formative years as a scientist and that his theory of evolution inspired artists of his day and after.

Three of the reviewed works are edited collections of essays with multiple authors, two of which were written to accompany major exhibitions. The authors are leading international specialists, from a variety of disciplines, including history of science, history of art, visual anthropology, comparative literature, as well as studio art and creative writing. (That only two authors overlap between them is but one indication of the wide range and scope of work currently being done in this area.) Along with recent books by Browne, Constance Clark, and Smith, the books reviewed here open new fields of study of Darwinism and visual arts.²

Jeanette Hoorn’s edited collection of essays for Reframing Darwin: Evolution and Art in Australia, published...