Looking at Darwin: Portraits and the making of an icon

ISIS

Volumn 100, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 542-570

  Browne, Janet ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ART; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; EVOLUTION; HISTORY; PHOTOGRAPHY; REVIEW; SCIENCE;

ART; CULTURE; EVOLUTION; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; PHOTOGRAPHY; SCIENCE;

EID: 73349083985     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/644630     Document Type: Review

References (127)

1. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, with an introduction by Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 490. Solondz's installation was sponsored by Boston University, Nov. 2006-Apr. 2007; see http://www.bu.edu/today/node/2284. For DiPaola's mutating portrait see http://www.dipaola.org/art/page.php?gallery.
2. See also Kevin Padian, "Darwin's Enduring Legacy", Nature, 2008, 451:632-634.
3. Susan Adele Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield, by Tom Phillips, computer-processed drawings and video, 1999-2000, National Portrait Gallery, London, PG 6526. This work is discussed in Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits, 1660-2000 (London: Reaktion in association with the National Portrait Gallery, 2000), pp. 162-163.
4. On the anniversary events see Marsha L. Richmond, "The 1909 Darwin Celebration: Reexamining Evolution in the Light of Mendel, Mutation, and Meiosis", Isis, 2006, 97:447-484;
5. and Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, "The 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration in America", in Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory, ed. Pnina G. Abir-Am and Clark A. Elliot, Osiris, 2nd Ser., 1999, 14:274-323. There is a listing of the individuals pictured and an analysis of the Beatles' album cover on Wikipedia under "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", http://en. wikipedia.org.
6. Nick Hopwood, Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud, forthcoming; there is an abstract at www.zfl.gwz-berlin. de/fileadmin/bilder/ Projekte/slsa/documentation. htm.
7. For a general overview of the rise of interest in the visual see M. Norton Wise, "Making Visible", Isis, 2006, 97:75-82.
8. Alan Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle (New York: Harper & Row, 1969);
9. John Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1990);
10. and Adrian Desmond and James R. Moore, Darwin (London: Joseph, 1991).
11. Janet Browne, "Presidential Address: Commemorating Darwin", British Journal for the History of Science, 2005, 38:251-274.
12. Some of these issues, as they relate to a range of other figures, are addressed in Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, eds., Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996);
13. see esp. Geoffrey Cantor, "The Scientist as Hero: Public Images of Michael Faraday", ibid., pp. 171-193.
14. See also Yeo, "Genius, Method, and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760-1860", Science in Context, 1988, 2:257-284;
15. Gertrude M. Prescott, "Faraday: Image of the Man and the Collector", in Faraday Rediscovered: Essays on the Life and Work of Michael Faraday, ed. David Gooding and Frank James (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 15-32;
16. and Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (New York: Lang, 2005).
17. Specifically on Franklin, Newton, and Einstein see Charles Coleman Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1962);
18. Milo Keynes, The Iconography of Sir Isaac Newton to 1800 (Woodbridge, U. K./Rochester, N. Y.: Boydell in association with Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005);
19. and Alan J. Friedman and Carol C. Donley, Einstein as Myth and Muse (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).
20. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005);
21. and Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004).
22. See particularly Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988);
23. and James R. Moore, "Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s", Journal of the History of Biology, 1991, 24:353-408.
24. Some aspects of the rise of the Darwin legend can be found in Janet Browne, "Darwin's Birthdays", Nature, 2008, 456:324-325.
25. For a recent summary of brand images see Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis, and Jane C. Ginsburg, eds., Trade Marks and Brands: An Interdisciplinary Critique (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008).
26. There are some relevant points for historians in Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004);
27. and Ronald Hambleton, The Branding of America: From Levi Strauss to Chrysler, from Westinghouse to Gillette, the Forgotten Fathers of America's Best-Known Brand Names (Dublin, N. H.: Yankee, 1987).
28. Antonello La Vergata, "Images of Darwin: A Historiographic Overview", in The Darwinian Heritage, ed. David Kohn (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 901-972.
29. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York: Freeman, 1995).
30. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007);
31. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2008);
32. and Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994).
33. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882: With Original Omissions Restored, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958). The codification of the evolutionary synthesis and its public showing at Chicago in 1959 was a key moment for several reasons.
34. See Bowler, Non-Darwinian Revolution (cit. n. 9), for a reevaluation of Darwin's scientific reputation in the years 1880-1940.
35. Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996), describes Mayr's important role in bringing a freshly retooled selectionist Darwinism into the picture. Around this time Mayr became a noted commentator on the history of biology, ascribing the pivotal point in biology's intellectual history to Darwin's Origin of Species.
36. See, e.g., Thomas Junker, "Factors Shaping Ernst Mayr's Concepts in the History of Biology", J. Hist. Biol., 1996, 29:29-77;
37. and Smocovitis, "What Made Ernst Unique?" ibid., 2005, 38:609-614.
38. Recently, Mary P. Winsor has neatly deconstructed Mayr's historiography in "The Creation of the Essentialism Story: An Exercise in Metahistory", History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2006, 28:149-174. I am grateful to Polly Winsor for sharing her views before publication. Frederick Churchill makes the point that more biologists than historians produced biographical works on Darwin for the centenary;
39. see F. B Churchill, "Darwin and the Historian", Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 1982, 17:45-68.
40. Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1977).
41. Some of the issues are set out in Pnina G. Abir-Am, "Themes, Genres, and Orders of Legitimation in the Consolidation of New Scientific Disciplines: Deconstructing the Historiography of Molecular Biology", History of Science, 1985, 23:73-117. Mathematicians and physicists are able to buy all kinds of commodities embellished with significant figures in their field; see http://www.mathematicianspictures.com/famousphysicists.
42. This topic is explored in Thomas Söderqvist, "Existential Projects and Existential Choice in Science: Science Biography as an Edifying Genre", in Telling Lives in Science, ed. Shortland and Yeo (cit. n. 7), pp. 45-84;
43. and Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, "Pas de Deux: The Biographer and the Living Biographical Subject", in The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, ed. Söderqvist (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 207-220.
44. This topic is considered in a special issue of Science in Context, 2003, 16, and the essays in Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, eds., Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998). Although the volume is not directly concerned with scientists
45. see also Geoff Cubitt and Allen Warren, eds., Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000).
46. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1985).
47. See also Marcia R. Pointon, The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
48. Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York: Knopf, 2002), pp. 385, 460. Issues of disembodiment are more broadly discussed in Lawrence and Shapin, eds., Science Incarnate (cit. n. 18).
49. On Darwin in particular see Browne, "I Could Have Retched All Night: Charles Darwin and His Body", ibid., pp. 240-287.
50. Newton offers an obvious comparison, as described in Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius (London: Macmillan, 2002).
51. In process, compiled by John van Wyhe and Gene Kritsky, see The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk, duplicated on Wikipedia.
52. For the earlier lists mentioned see Richard Freeman, Charles Darwin: A Companion (Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1978), pp. 94-98;
53. A. J. Desmond, J. R. Moore, and Janet Browne, "Darwin", in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), under "Likenesses";
54. and Francis Darwin, ed., Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), Vol. 3, pp. 371-372.
55. Jordanova, Defining Features (cit. n. 2);
56. and Patricia Fara, "Framing the Evidence: Scientific Biography and Portraiture", in History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, ed. Söderqvist (cit. n. 17), pp. 71-91.
57. See also Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993).
58. The dates of these images are sometimes confused. The pencil drawing of Charles Darwin was paid for in December 1839;
59. see English Heritage, Down House manuscripts, Darwin's Account Books. Then Emma and Charles both sat for colored portraits in March 1840. Two years later a pencil sketch of Emma was made.
60. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 731-751.
61. See also Ian Knizek, "Walter Benjamin and the Mechanical Reproducibility of Art Works Revisited", British Journal of Aesthetics, 1993, 33:357-366.
62. Francis Darwin regarded it as "the finest representation of my father that has been produced";
63. see F. Darwin, ed., Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (cit. n. 21), Vol. 3, p. 195. Emma Darwin found it rough and dismal;
64. see Browne, Charles Darwin: Power of Place (cit. n. 20), p. 424. There is a proof copy of the Rajon etching in the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. This seems to be a special fine art issue, with eight additional portrait sketches-one of which is recognizably Darwin-around the mount. Darwin's remark to Joseph Hooker was made in a letter, 30 Mar. 1875, Cambridge University Library, Darwin Archive DAR 93:382.
65. Anon., "The Darwin Celebration", American Museum Journal, 1909, 9(3):53-56, http://www.naturalhistorymag.com;
66. and John Woram, "Portraits in the Round: Busts of Charles Darwin", http://www.galapagos.to. I am very grateful to Melissa Lo, of the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, who kindly allowed me to use information from her unpublished research into the 1909 AMNH Darwin exhibition, "From Bust to Beagle: Darwin on Display and the Making of Modern American Science, 1909-1959."
67. The Cambridge gift was personally presented by Henry Fairfield Osborn;
68. see Woram, "Portraits in the Round", n. 29.
69. Jordanova, Defining Features (cit. n. 2);
70. and Ludmilla Jordanova, "Presidential Address: Remembrance of Science Past", Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 2000, 33:387-406.
71. See also Patricia Fara, "Faces of Genius: Images of Isaac Newton in Eighteenth-Century England", in Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives, ed. Cubitt and Warren (cit. n. 18), pp. 57-81;
72. and Fara, "Isaac Newton Lived Here: Sites of Memory and Scientific Heritage", Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 2000, 33:407-426.
73. F. Darwin, ed., Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (cit. n. 21), Vol. 3, p. 222.
74. Charles Darwin to George Romanes, 27 May 1881, extract in Andrew Thomas Gage and William Thomas Stearn, A Bicentenary History of the Linnean Society of London (London: Academic, 1988), p. 64.
75. This letter is also listed in Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith et al., eds., A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1821-1882: With Supplement, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), item 13178.
76. Edward Lane, Letter Read by Dr. B. W. Richardson F. R. S. at His Lecture on Chas. Darwin F. R. S. in St. George's Hall, Langham Place, October 22nd, 1882 (London: Privately printed, 1882)
77. discussed in Browne, Charles Darwin: Power of Place (cit. n. 20), p. 65.
78. Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith et al., eds., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985-), Vol. 10, pp. 300, 627. As a young man, Darwin had grown a beard on the Beagle voyage while surveying in Tierra del Fuego;
79. see Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (New York: Knopf, 1995), pp. 217, 246.
80. Burkhardt and Smith et al., eds., Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Vol. 12, pp. 240 (Hooker), 272 (Gray), 212 (Darwin). Hooker refers to a photograph taken by William Darwin and alludes to the new frescoes for the restored Houses of Parliament in London.
81. For the quotation see http://virtualstoa.net/2007/09/29/beards-and- philosophers.
82. On beards more generally see Allan Peterkin, One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair (Vancouver: Arsenal, 2001);
83. and Reginald Reynolds, Beards: An Omnium gatherum (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950).
84. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), Vol. 2, pp. 317-323, 372, 379-380.
85. See also J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940 (New York: St. Martin's, 1987);
86. and John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2005).
87. Masculinity in art is discussed in Joseph Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-Century British Classical-Subject Painting (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1989).
88. Janet Browne, "Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularization and Dissemination of Evolutionary Theory", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 2001, 145:496-509, rpt. in The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture, ed. Fae Brauer and Barbara Larson (Lebanon, N. H.: Univ. Press New England, 2009).
89. John Collier made only one painting that features a physician, the fictitious Sentence of Death, exhibited in 1908 and now in Wolverhampton Art Gallery, U. K.
90. The National Portrait Gallery copy (painted by Collier) was presented by Darwin's oldest son, William, in 1896. The Royal Society of London copy was painted by Miss M. B. Messer; it is undated and was purchased in 1916. The Down House copy is attributed to an artist named Reilly, with no further information except that it was commissioned by George Buckston Browne, who donated the funds to preserve the house as a museum in the 1920s.
91. Joseph John Elliott and Clarence Edmund Fry ran the premier photographic studio of England for many decades. They established their first premises at 55 Baker Street, London, in 1863; the studio is described in H. Baden Pritchard, The Photographic Studios of Europe, 1841-1884 (New York: Arno, 1973). The firm was taken over by Studio Bassano in 1963. According to the National Gallery of London, sittings were charged at a guinea, which entitled the sitter to eighteen cartes de visite (visiting card size) or six of the larger "cabinet portrait" photographs. The firm took outdoor portrait shots of other individuals, including William Gladstone chopping a tree in 1887;
92. see http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/victorianphotographs-by- elliott-and-fry.php.
93. Phillip Prodger, "Photography and The Expression of the Emotions", in Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 399-423. Prodger's book Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
94. See esp. Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006);
95. and Julia Voss, Darwins Bilder: Ansichten der Evolutionstheorie, 1837-1874 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2007).
96. In the original image Darwin faces to the viewer's left, which when transposed to a frontispiece makes him look outward, away from the volume that follows his picture. Most book designers today would consider this badly chosen.
97. Anon., "Unveiling the Statue of the Late Charles Darwin in the Natural History Museum, South Kensington", Graphic, 20 June 1885, pp. 621-622.
98. These matters are discussed in many texts, but see esp. Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography (Aldershot, Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2001);
99. Andrew T. Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Lane, 1979);
100. and Janet Browne, "Darwin and the Face of Madness", in The Anatomy of Madness, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, 2 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985), Vol. 1, pp. 151-165.
101. I am grateful to Professor Kentwood Wells of the University of Connecticut, in whose possession the lantern slide resides, for this information.
102. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected and Translated, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), p. 26.
103. Darwin's medical relationships are described in Janet Browne, "Spas and Sensibilities: Darwin at Malvern", in The Medical History of Spas and Waters, ed. Roy Porter, Medical History, Suppl. 5, 1990, pp. 102-113.
104. I have seen two: one is in the Royal Society of London collection, the other at Darwin College, Cambridge. Cameron's images of Darwin are further described in Browne, "I Could Have Retched All Night" (cit. n. 20).
105. Darwin's picture is in Lovell Reeve and Edward Walford, Portraits of Men of Eminence (London: Lovell Reeve, 1863-1867), Vol. 5 (1866), pp. 49-52. A fee of £1 for Ernest Edwards, the photographer for that volume, is recorded in Darwin's Account Book, 2 Mar. 1866, and another sum of £3.8s.6d on 5 Sept.
106. See also Ernest Edwards and Walford, Representative Men in Literature, Science, and Art (London: A. W. Bennett, 1868).
107. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago/London: Univ. Chicago Press, 1985);
108. and Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation (Chicago/London: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994).
109. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has some glass negatives from Julia Margaret Cameron's work, but none of these feature Darwin. The Stereoscope photograph is in the collection of the Wellcome Library, London.
110. The Faraday photograph can be seen at http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/history/ faraday.htm.
111. John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003);
112. and Frances Dimond, Crown and Camera: The Royal Family and Photography, 1842-1910 (New York: Viking, 1987).
113. The rise of commercial portrait photography is discussed in Browne, "I Could Have Retched All Night" (cit. n. 20). In 1856 the London firm of Maull & Polyblank charged 5s. for an albumen print, measuring 8 × 6 inches. Three cartes de visite cost 2s.6d. from Ernest Edwards in the mid-1860s.
114. See also Gertrude Mae Prescott, "Fame and Photography: Portrait Publications in Great Britain, 1856-1900" (Univ. Microfilms International, 1986).
115. The figures derive from "Miscellanea", Photographic Journal, 15 Mar. 1862, p. 21;
116. "Commercial Photography", British Journal of Photography, 2 Jan. 1867, p. 47;
117. and Andrew Wynter, "Cartes de visite", Once a Week, 1862, 6:1134-1137
118. quoted from Journal of the Photographic Society of London, 1862, 7:375-377, on p. 376. According to anecdote, five thousand portraits of John Wilkes Booth were sold after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
119. E. A. Darwin to Charles Darwin, undated, Oct. 1862, Cambridge University Library, Darwin Archive DAR 105(Ser. 2):9. The fashion for these checked trousers seemed to last.
120. Matthew Arnold was photographed by Studio Bassano in the 1880s wearing a pair; the picture is reproduced in Bevis Hillier, Victorian Studio Photographs from the Collections of Studio Bassano and Elliott and Fry, London (Boston: Godine, 1976).
121. Jordanova, Defining Features (cit. n. 2), pp. 41-42, 61-74.
122. See also Christine MacLeod and Jennifer Tann, "From Engineer to Scientist: Reinventing Invention in the Watt and Faraday Centenaries, 1919-31", Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 2007, 40:389-411;
123. and Hilaire Cuny, Louis Pasteur: Choix de textes, bibliographie, portraits, facsimiles (Paris: Seghers, 1963).
124. On Madame Tussaud's see http://www.madametussauds.com/London/About/ History.
125. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918). Strachey's biographer, Michael Holroyd, states that Strachey originally intended to present a conventional biographical picture of the age by giving twelve silhouettes of Victorian worthies-including Ellen Terry, the Duke of Devonshire, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Jowett, and John Stuart Mill. When he decided instead to "debunk" the era he chose only those figures whom he could satirize as being old-fashioned.
126. See Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 269.
127. Desmond and Moore, Darwin (cit. n. 5).