ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“A Clever Woman Can Put Drawing and Painting to Use in a Thousand Ways”: Natural History Illustration and Gendered Material Practices in Early Modern Europe

• In Event: From Sketch to Knowledge: Visual Mediation in Early Modern Natural History

English Abstract

Early modern female botanical and entomological illustrators have attracted significant scholarly attention in the last decade. A number of recent biographies, facsimiles, and exhibition catalogues have contributed new insights into the lives and work of artists such as Maria Sibylla Merian, Alida Withoos, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Susanna and Anna Lister. Drawing and painting, however, constituted only one means by which early modern women represented the natural world. This paper situates natural history illustration within the broader context of early modern women’s artistic practices. Bringing together textual, visual, and material sources, I examine how artforms like drawing, painting, embroidery, and artificial flower making formed an interconnected set of material practices in which women produced lifelike depictions of natural things. Viewing women’s natural history illustration in this wider perspective, I propose, enables a fuller understanding of the social, scientific, and cultural meanings of the images created by female artists.

Author

• Stephanie Reitzig, Columbia University