The Palette of Nature: SHNH Summer Meeting 2024 by Joyce Dixon

by  Joyce Dixon, Postdoctoral researcher

The 2024 SHNH International Summer Meeting took place over two days at the National Museum Cardiff. It proved to be a vibrant exploration of the colours of nature, exploring their myriad representations in print and paint. Spanning six centuries, the meeting’s sixteen papers approached the subject of natural-historical colour using diverse methodologies, from scientific analysis to visual inspection, artistic reconstruction and archival research.

Across the meeting various themes and subjects recurred, making for a dynamic ongoing discourse. Tanja M. Schuster (The Natural History Museum Vienna) presented the results of collaborative research into the Museum’s collection of field drawings by Ferdinand Bauer, exposing the significance of Bauer’s ‘paint by numbers’ approach for scientific knowledge-making. In her parallel paper, Jane Jelley’s expert knowledge of artists’ materials underpinned her speculative investigation of Bauer’s ‘colour code’ for the Flora Graeca (1786–1794).

Also focussed on floral chromatics, Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen discussed the materiality of early-modern watercolour as employed in seventeenth-century florilegia, while Christoffer Basse Eriksen unveiled the complex subtexts of class and gender politics in the making of the Flora Danica (1761–1883). Heather Pardoe (Principle Curator of Botany at National Museum Wales) surveyed the Museum’s extensive collection of botanical illustrations.

Combining concerns of representation and standardisation, several speakers chose to focus on the taxonomy of natural colour. John David (Head of Horticultural Taxonomy at the Royal Horticultural Society) traced the history of horticultural colour charts, from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Visiting from the Smithsonian Institution, Richard Gilreath discussed the ‘matter of extreme difficulty’ that was Robert Ridgway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912), and its connection to the Smithsonian’s archival collections. Giulia Simonini (TU Berlin) compared the format and purpose of colour charts produced by Ridgway’s eighteenth-century predecessors Abraham Gottlob Werner, Jacob Christian Schäffer and Moses Harris.

Engaging with themes of colonialism and empire, Cam Sharp Jones (British Library) traced the development of natural history illustration in South Asia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, challenging existing perceptions of the significance of the East India Company School. Moving East, Katharine Enright’s lyrical paper discussed Theodor Cantor’s Malayan Sketches of nineteenth-century zoology in Singapore and Penang. My own presentation, on the Scottish work Illustrations of Ornithology (1826/7–1843), explored the consumption of empire via ornithological colour.

Also with a focus on feathered subjects, Arthur MacGregor contrasted the approaches to ornithological illustration adopted by George Edwards (1694–1773) and Francis Buchanan (1762–1829). Birds also featured heavily in Sarah Finn’s archival exploration of the publishing history of the popular scientific series The Naturalist’s Library (1833–1843), while Paul Martin explored the fleeting and fugitive nature of ichthyological colours from his unique position as biologist, angler and rare book collector.

Centring his talk on a single illustration, Graham Rowe explored the cultural afterlife of the engraving of the Cape Mountain Zebra first published in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle (1764). The only speaker to divert from biological colour was Duncan Hawley, whose chromatic analysis focussed on the theoretical, aesthetic, and naturalistic considerations of cartographical colour in nineteenth-century British maps.

The subject-echoes and cross-pollination of ideas across the meeting came together beautifully and were continued over coffee, lunch, drinks and at the conference dinner. The meeting culminated in a tour of natural-historical illustrations and objects in the National Museum Cardiff collections.