HUM 210 : Understanding our World Through the Arts

Explores how artists depicted the natural world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, drawing on the works of renowned painters, naturalists, and explorers to explain how their images changed the way nature was seen and understood.

Known as the "Audubon of Botany," Philadelphia, Quaker Mary Morris Vaux Walcott (1860-1940) was a gifted artist whose stunning watercolors comprise a catalog of North American wildflowers. Walcott was catapulted to the highest levels of society and national politics by a late and bold marriage to the secretary of the Smithsonian.

Though at first glance the natural world may appear overwhelming in its diversity and complexity, there are regularities running through it, from the hexagons of a honeycomb to the spirals of a seashell and the branching veins of a leaf. Revealing the order at the foundation of the seemingly chaotic natural world, Patterns in Nature explores not only the math and science but also the beauty and artistry behind nature's awe-inspiring designs.

On the bicentennial of his death, this beautifully illustrated volume pays tribute to the Scot who became the father of American ornithology. Alexander Wilson made unique contributions to ecology and animal behavior. His drawings of birds in realistic poses in their natural habitat inspired Audubon, Spencer Fullerton Baird, and other naturalists.

Visual depictions were profoundly significant for Darwin's long-term argument for evolutionary theory; each characterizes a different aspect of his relationship with the visual information and constitutes what can be called an "icon" of evolution. Voss shows how Darwin "thought with his eyes" and how his pictorial representations and the development and popularization of the theory of evolution were vitally interconnected.

When Audubon embarked for Liverpool from New Orleans in 1826, he carried with him more than 250 of his watercolor drawings in a heavy case, a packet of letters of introduction. This journal documents an American icon's transformation from a beleaguered backwoods artist and naturalist to the man who would become America's premier ornithologist, illustrator of birds, and nature essayist.