Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature

Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature traced the role of drawing and botany in the development of early photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on a period of tremendous advances in graphic media, the exhibition featured over 300 beautiful natural history illustrations of the Victorian era and showed a fertile exchange among graphic media, including: drawings, "nature prints" (direct imprints from plants), hand-colored prints, mounted specimens, and "photogenic drawings" (photographs made without a camera).

In mid-nineteenth-century England and Scotland, the advent of photography generated as much creative fervor as digital media had in recent years, but rather than rendering conventional drawing obsolete, this art form encouraged experimentation with all kinds of media. The centerpiece of Ocean Flowers was the drawings and photograms of the British artist Anna Atkins (1799–1871) and her contemporaries. Atkins was the first person to create a book of botanical illustrations printed exclusively with photographic techniques. From 1843 to 1853, Atkins created stunning albums of cyanotypes to illustrate ordered series of seaweed species. These pioneering photograms were one-of-a-kind photographic prints created by laying the specimens directly on light-sensitive paper, and then exposing the paper to the sun.

Ocean Flowers also encompassed important examples from the wider field of natural history, including illustrations of ferns, feathers, shells, stones, flowers, coconuts, batwings, and snake skins made by amateur and professional artists, scientists, and specialists. Among the works featured were drawings by Walter Fitch, William Harvey, William Jackson Hooker, Harriet Moseley, Jane M. Patison, Mrs. Simpson, Mrs. Dawson Turner, and Catherine Wills; photograms by Anna Atkins, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Sir John Herschel; "nature prints" by Alois Auer and Henry Bradbury; mounted specimens published by Mary Howard and Mary Wyatt; and works in various media by anonymous artists, some of which were from India.