ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Environmental History of Étienne Trouvelot’s 'Astronomical Drawings'

• In Event: Celestial Spheres

English Abstract

This talk considers a suite of extraordinary chromolithographs created in the 1880s by the astronomer and illustrator Étienne-Leopold Trouvelot. Based on his work at the Harvard Observatory and the United States Naval Observatory, the chromolithographs combine the methods and media of art and science in an attempt to generate knowledge about astronomical phenomena, such as sunspots, solar flares, and eclipses, that eluded perception and resisted documentation. From the perspective of the history of astronomy, Trouvelot's prints, equal parts fact and fiction, represent a fascinating episode in the history of scientific visualization. Read against the grain, through the lens of multiple disciplines, among them art history, environmental history, and entomology, and by considering their terrestrial and material contexts and conditions, the prints tell a much more complex and many-layered story: about global trade, geopolitics, humans and animals, ecology, and environmental destruction. In this way, Trouvelot’s astronomical images may be understood as loquacious and unruly for what they have to say about both the celestial sphere and terra firma and for how they challenge the categories of terrain, species, and being that nineteenth-century science in Europe and the United States so doggedly constructed. Dismantling the order of things in a tangle of chromolithographed textures and hues, the prints present an object lesson in what the call for papers evocatively terms “epistemic disobedience.”

Author

• Rachael Ziady DeLue, Princeton University