Trained as a botanist, Anna Atkins developed an interest in photography as a means of recording botanical specimens for a scientific reference book, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. This publication was one of the first uses of light-sensitive materials to illustrate a book. Instead of traditional letterpress printing, the book's handwritten text and illustrations were created by the cyanotype method. Atkins printed and published Part I of British Algae in 1843 and in doing so established photography as an accurate medium for scientific illustration.

Atkins learned directly about the invention of photography through her correspondence with its inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot. Although she owned a camera, she used only the camera-less photogenic drawing technique to produce all of her botanical images. With the assistance of Anne Dixon, Atkins created albums of cyanotype photogenic drawings of her botanical specimens. She learned the cyanotype printing method through its inventor, the astronomer and scientist Sir John Herschel, a family friend.

Avail Atkin's Cyanotype prints

Haeckel saw evolution as the basis for a unified explanation of all nature and the rationale of a philosophical approach that denied final causes and the teleology of the church. His Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866; “General Morphology of Organisms”) presented many of his evolutionary ideas, but the scientific community was little interested. He set forth his ideas in popular writings, all of which were widely read though they were deplored by many of Haeckel’s scientific colleagues.

Haeckel, Ernst: Paleontological tree of vertebrates. From Ernst Haeckel'sThe Evolution of Man: A Popular Scientific Study, 5th ed., 1910.(more)

Enthusiastically attempting to explain both inorganic and organic nature under the same physical laws, Haeckel portrayed the lowest creatures as mere protoplasm without nuclei; he speculated that they had arisen spontaneously through combinations of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur. In those days of great interest in protoplasm, it was believed for a while that certain deep-sea dredgings had brought up such structureless organisms; when scientists found this to be in error, Haeckel continued to insist, throughout the years, that “monera” existed. From them he traced one-celled forms with nuclei and three kingdoms—animal, vegetable, and the neutral, borderline “protista.” His artistic leanings toward ideal symmetries led him to outline numerous genealogical trees, sometimes to supply missing links or branches; and he reconstructed the human ancestral tree to demonstrate humankind’s descent from the lower animals.

Haeckel saw evolution as the basis for a unified explanation of all nature and the rationale of a philosophical approach that denied final causes and the teleology of the church. His Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866; “General Morphology of Organisms”) presented many of his evolutionary ideas, but the scientific community was little interested. He set forth his ideas in popular writings, all of which were widely read though they were deplored by many of Haeckel’s scientific colleagues.

Haeckel, Ernst:Paleontological tree of vertebrates. From Ernst Haeckel'sThe Evolution of Man: A Popular Scientific Study, 5th ed., 1910.(more)

Enthusiastically attempting to explain both inorganic and organic nature under the same physical laws, Haeckel portrayed the lowest creatures as mere protoplasm without nuclei; he speculated that they had arisen spontaneously through combinations of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur. In those days of great interest in protoplasm, it was believed for a while that certain deep-sea dredgings had brought up such structureless organisms; when scientists found this to be in error, Haeckel continued to insist, throughout the years, that “monera” existed. From them he traced one-celled forms with nuclei and three kingdoms—animal, vegetable, and the neutral, borderline “protista.” His artistic leanings toward ideal symmetries led him to outline numerous genealogical trees, sometimes to supply missing links or branches; and he reconstructed the human ancestral tree to demonstrate humankind’s descent from the lower animals.

Haeckel tended to speculate, and for some years, he pondered the problem of heredity. Interestingly, though it was only on a theoretical basis, he suggested as early as 1866 that the cell nucleus was concerned with inheritance. He had long been thinking of “vital molecular movement” when, in 1876, he attempted to place heredity on a molecular basis in a work entitled Die Perigenesis der Plastidule (“The Generation of Waves in the Small Vital Particles”). Here again he traced a branching scheme, this time to illustrate the mechanism of heredity and to show the influence of outer conditions on the inherited undulatory motion he attributed to the “plastidules,” the term he adopted for the molecules making up protoplasm.

Though his concepts of recapitulation were in error, Haeckel brought attention to important biological questions. His gastraea theory, tracing all multicellular animals to a hypothetical two-layered ancestor, stimulated both discussion and investigation. His propensities to systematization along evolutionary lines led to his valuable contributions to the knowledge of such invertebrates as medusae, radiolarians, siphonophores, and calcareous sponges.

Building collections around his own, Haeckel founded both the Phyletic Museum in Jena and the Ernst Haeckel Haus; the latter contains his books and archives, and it preserves many other mementos of his life and work.

Text Courtesy

Eugène Cuvelier French, 1837 - 1900 A painter and photographer in Arras, Eugène Cuvelier focused on the natural landscape of Fontainebleau and its environs. His father, Adalbert, who also painted and photographed, taught Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot the process of cliché-verre, an early printmaking process based on sensitivity to light. The works of the father and son are often difficult to distinguish. Eugène expanded the link between photography and painting, producing a substantial series of calotypes of natural subjects in the style of the Barbizon School. A member of the Société française de photographie, he continued to use paper negatives at a late date, preferring their soft aesthetic result that suggested painting. The Cuveliers were also members of the Barbizon artistic community: At the wedding of Eugène to Louise Ganne, daughter of the celebrated innkeeper, Jean-François Millet and Théodore Rousseau took on the task of decoration and Corot served as best man. Today, Cuvelier's works are treasured for their direct portrayal of nature and the delicacy with which photography was adapted to the task.

Kairav Engineer is the Vice President of Business Development at Astral Limited. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Management from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA. Belonging to the promoter family of Astral, Kairav, has been in the family business since 2011.

In 2018, Kairav founded ‘Safari Crafters’, a boutique safari company that creates bespoke wildlife and travel experiences around the world. He frequents Ranthambore and Jawai, both in Rajasthan, home to some of India’s most exotic wildlife experiences. Kairav’s photographic journey has also reached East and South Africa - bringing to us some of the most beautiful images of animal life from the continent.

Kairav has a crucial role in driving Astral Foundation’s CSR projects across numerous tiger reserves in India. This book throws light at some of these projects and the multi-faceted effort of the foundation in conserving these ecological marvels.

Gauguin spent the first seven years of his life with his mother and great uncle in Peru. In 1855 his mother took him back to France where he attended boarding school. He joined the merchant marine when he was seventeen and began traveling around South America. When Gauguin's mother died in 1868, Gustave Arosa, an art collector and photographer, became his legal guardian. Arosa's collection included works by Corot (q.v.), Courbet (q.v.), Delacroix (q.v.), and the Barbizon painters, and it was he who would encourage Gauguin to start painting. In 1872 Arosa found a job for Gauguin at a brokerage firm, giving him financial security. The following year he married a Danish woman, Mette Gad. Gauguin had already started painting and sculpting in his spare time and first exhibited at the Salon in 1876 with a landscape.1 He was asked by Pissarro (q.v.) and Degas (q.v.) to participate in the fourth impressionist exhibition in 1879, where from then on he would exhibit regularly. Durand-Ruel began purchasing his paintings, and in turn Gauguin started to collect the works of his colleagues, such as Manet (q.v.) and Renoir (q.v.) and, in particular, Cézanne (q.v.) and Pissarro. He went to Pontoise in 1882, where he painted with Cézanne and Pissarro, who along with Degas continued to influence him at this period. In 1883 Gauguin decided to become a full-time artist. In 1884 he moved with his wife and children to Rouen and then to Copenhagen, but he failed to earn a comfortable living. He returned to Paris in 1886 and met ceramicist Ernest Chaplet (1835-1909), who introduced him to his métier. Gauguin distanced himself from impressionism and in 1888 worked in Pont-Aven with Émile Bernard (1868-1941), who had been experimenting with creating compositions using flat areas of color and dark outlines (cloissonism). Gauguin also studied Japanese prints and Indonesian art. The impact of these influences is evident in Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), so far removed from his earlier impressionist style. Succumbing to van Gogh's (q.v.) many requests, Gauguin agreed to travel to Arles and paint with the artist; their characters, however, proved incompatible. Theo van Gogh, who worked for Boussod Valadon & Cie, would in the meantime sell Gauguin's work. For the next two years, Gauguin traveled often around Brittany. In search of a more pure and unspoiled culture, he auctioned off his paintings in 1891 in order to finance a journey to Tahiti. Upon his arrival, he was disappointed to find many expatriates and developed areas, yet he was still able to capture in his works an uncultivated spirit. He not only made paintings but also created bold woodcuts and sculptures and was an avid writer. Gauguin returned to France in 1893, where he was given a solo exhibition by Durand-Ruel that was not particularly successful. He decided to leave Europe again in 1895, moving to Tahiti and later to Hivaoa, a more remote island in the Marquesas. Because he abandoned naturalistic colors and used formal distortions in order to achieve expressive compositions, Gauguin's work became an inspiration for many subsequent artists.

Robert Thornton (1768-1837) was destined for a career in the church, but while at Trinity College, Cambridge he found inspiration in the botanical lectures of Thomas Martyn and switched to studying medicine. He went on to lecture in medical botany at Guy's Hospital. Conceived on a grandiose scale, Thornton's work was to comprise three parts: a dissertation on the sexual reproductive cycle of plates; an explanation of Linnaeus's plant system, lavishly illustrated with botanical plates and portraits of botanists; and "The Temple of Flora" which was to have no less than seventy large plates of exotic plant species arranged according to the classification system of Linnaeus. Each species was to appear in its native environment.

The production of the plates for "The Temple of Flora" involved a variety of techniques - aquatint, mezzotint, stipple engraving and stippling with line engraving or etching which required the participation of a large number of artists. Among those commissioned by Thornton were Philip Reinagle - who executed most of the preparatory drawings - Abraham Pether (known for his moody, quasi-Gothic landscapes), Sydenham Edwards, and Peter Henderson, and the engravers Richard Earlom, James Caldwall, and Thomas Burke. Only the plate of the Rose was drawn by Thornton and executed by Earlom.

In spite of using a host of artists and engravers, Thornton managed to "maintain a remarkable homogeneity of style throughout" (An Oak Spring Flora), but production was a protracted stop-and-go affair, causing the text and plates to appear irregularly, and to bring Thornton ultimately to the brink of personal bankruptcy. Because some plates were withdrawn or reworked in the course of publication, it is not possible to establish a definitive collation of the work. For his contribution to English botanical illustration, Thornton has been compared to Redouté by Alan Thomas: "more or less coeval with Redouté in France came the production of the greatest English colour-plate flower book... What Redouté produced under the patronage of L'Héritier, Marie Antoinette, the Empress Josephine, Charles X and the Duchesse de Berry, Thornton set out to do alone. The result was almost total failure ? His fortune was engulfed and his family reduced to penury... It is easy to raise one's eyebrows at Thornton's unworldly and injudicious approach to publishing... but he produced... the most strikingly beautiful set of flower plates ever to be printed in England [and] one of the loveliest books in the world

The second-generation Hudson River School painter Sanford Robinson Gifford built a reputation as a master of light and atmosphere. Born in Greenfield, Saratoga County, New York, as an infant he moved with his family to Hudson, New York, where his father operated and financed iron foundries and a bank. On his eldest brother Charles’s example, he became enamored of art at an early age and may have received some early instruction from Henry Ary, a landscape and portrait painter who had moved to Hudson from Catskill, where he had been a neighbor of Thomas Cole, the progenitor of the American landscape school. Gifford attended Brown University for two years in 1842–44, but did not graduate, telling his parents that he wished to be an artist. Soon after college, he went to New York City to study with the well-known art pedagogue (and fine watercolorist), the English emigré John Rubens Smith. Under Smith, and perhaps at his parents’ insistence, Gifford trained to become a portrait and figure painter, but longed to follow in Cole’s footsteps and to join what was already a small society of young artists inspired by Cole and Asher B. Durand, the president of the National Academy of Design, to pursue landscape painting. By 1847, Gifford had exhibited his first painting at the Academy, submitting almost annually thereafter. In 1850, he was elected an associate of the Academy and, in 1854, a full Academician.

Though Gifford’s signature style was emerging in the early 1850s, his artistic maturity did not come until well into his first trip to Europe, in 1855–57. An admirer of Turner since his boyhood perusals of his brother’s prints after the artist, Gifford studied and copied the master’s work in London’s National Gallery and even visited Turner’s champion, the critic John Ruskin, to discuss his work. Gifford moved on to visit France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. At Düsseldorf, he paused for a time with the community of American artists studying at the academy in that city; then, in the company of several of them, he traveled down the Rhine into Switzerland and Italy, settling in Rome in the spring of 1856. There, Gifford painted his first major—and largest-known—work, Lake Nemi (Toledo Museum of Art), in which he established the radiant sunlight and filmy atmosphere that mark his most memorable paintings. Sent to the Academy that spring, Lake Nemi was warmly received. After a sketching sojourn in spring 1857 with Albert Bierstadt to southern Italy and further touring in northern Austria, Germany, and northern Italy, in September Gifford returned to New York and soon rented working quarters in the new Studio Building on West Tenth Street, where Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and several other landscape painters became his neighbors.

The artist’s reputation mounted rapidly through the Civil War years, earned with masterworks such as the Metropolitan’s Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove) (1862; 15.30.62), in which the circular diffusion of sunlight seems to shape the terrain of the Catskill vale made famous in the fiction of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and in the early paintings of Cole. Such works were executed amidst the artist’s own service in the war, as a national guardsman stationed in defense of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore in the summers of 1861–63. In the latter year, Gifford lost a brother, Edward, in the conflict, and his beloved brother Charles committed suicide at the war’s outbreak in 1861. These personal tragedies may have informed signal pictures in an alternative style emphasizing stark crepuscular effects, for example, Twilight in the Catskills (1861; private collection) and Hunter Mountain, Twilight (1866; Terra Foundation of American Art). The latter was one of two Gifford paintings chosen, along with Winslow Homer‘s Prisoners from the Front (1866; 22.207), to represent American art at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.

In 1868–69, Gifford made his second and last Old World visit, this time adding an excursion down the Nile in Egypt and stops in Turkey and Greece to his return visits to Italy and other European nations. He lingered some six weeks in Venice, finding himself this time utterly seduced by the so-called Queen of the Adriatic. With its growing reputation as a tourist mecca, Venice became a frequent subject in the years thereafter, as did Italian subjects in general, such as the Metropolitan’s Tivoli (1870; 12.205.1) and Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore (1871; 21.115.1), with its coronal sunset effect silhouetting the mountainside that plummets into the lake at left. While in Rome, where he arrived in the company of his friend the artist Jervis McEntee and his wife, Gifford welcomed Frederic Church and his family, who had just completed their circuit of the Holy Land and Asia Minor.

The last decade of Gifford’s career was unexceptional for him just after his return to the United States, but events of his final years may have stimulated fresh inspiration. In the mid-1870s, the artist lent his voice to those conservative academicians opposing the younger, emerging talents in Continental-trained figural art who lobbied intensely for more and better representation at the academy exhibitions (and finally broke away to form the Society of American Artists). He married, in 1877, Mary Canfield, a widow. Ever independent and self-effacing, he is said to have confided to a colleague that he did so primarily as a goodwill gesture to a departed former schoolmate. Whatever the circumstances, the artist produced some of his finest canvases in his last years, such as Sunset over the Palisades on the Hudson (1879; private collection), which adapts effects of Gifford’s Italian lake scenes, and Ruins of the Parthenon (1880; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), an eloquent criticism of Church’s aggrandizing treatment of the same subject in a painting (15.30.67) of nine years earlier.

An avid angler, Gifford was on a fishing excursion to Lake Superior when he contracted a respiratory ailment and succumbed rapidly in the summer of 1880 at the age of fifty-six. Cherished by his colleagues, aside from his art, for his quiet simplicity, integrity, and stoicism tinged with melancholy, he was eulogized at a memorial meeting of the National Academy of Design. A founder of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870, in 1881 Gifford was accorded the institution’s first monographic retrospective, in its new building in Central Park. The Museum in the same year also published the Memorial Catalogue of the Paintings of Sanford Robinson Gifford, N.A., compiled by his friend McEntee and the Museum’s Waldo Pratt, listing 735 works. Those form the majority, if scarcely all, of the output of this productive and first-rank Hudson River School painter.

Citation

Avery, Kevin J. “Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.

Shubhojit Chatterjee is a photographer turned publisher. He is the founder and CEO of Binder Photo-books.

Born in Philadelphia, Thomas Doughty was the first American artist to work exclusively as a landscapist and was successful both for his skill and the fact that Americans were turning their interest to landscape. He was known for his quiet, often atmospheric landscapes of the rivers and mountains of Pennsylvania, New York, New England, and especially the Hudson River Valley. He taught himself how to paint while apprenticing for a leather manufacturer. In 1827 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician.

He worked mostly in Philadelphia, but also lived and worked in Boston and New York.

The son of a clergyman, Vincent van Gogh was sent to The Hague at the age of sixteen to become an apprentice at Goupil & Co., an art dealer with whom his uncle was affiliated. In August 1872 van Gogh began his extensive correspondence with his younger brother Theo, who would join the Brussels branch of the firm the following year. Vincent was transferred to the London offices in 1873 and two years later to the Paris office, but he despised the art trade and was dismissed in 1876. He then taught briefly at a boarding school in Ramsgate and Isleworth, and, back in the Netherlands, worked in a bookshop in Dordrecht before moving to Amsterdam to study theology. In little more than a year he had left the university and entered missionary school, failing again. Still intent on entering the ministry, he moved to the Borinage in Belgium and became a lay evangelist to the miners. Van Gogh finally decided to become an artist in August 1880 and started copying works by Millet (q.v.), the painter of peasant life. With his brother's financial help, he briefly joined the Academy in Brussels. The following year he returned to The Hague, where he received some artistic training from his cousin by marriage, Anton Mauve (1838-1888). There van Gogh met Sien Hoornik, a pregnant prostitute with a five-year-old daughter, with whom he lived briefly. Unable to marry her because of his family's disapproval, he moved in November 1883 from The Hague to the province of Drenthe, a popular place for artists, where he painted and drew laborers and peasants. Feeling terribly lonely, he visited his parents in December 1884 in Nuenen, and it was there that he finally decided to become a painter of peasant life. Van Gogh completed The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) in April 1885 and sent it to his brother in Paris. On 25 November he moved to Antwerp, where he reveled in the work of Rubens and first came to know Japanese prints. Van Gogh traveled to Paris in March 1886 and lived with Theo. Under the influence of the impressionists, and works by Monticelli (q.v.), his palette changed to more intense and vibrant colors. He began to associate with Émile Bernard (1868-1941), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), Degas (q.v.), Gauguin (q.v.), Pissarro (q.v.), and Seurat (q.v.) and started collecting some of their paintings as well as Japanese prints. He moved to Arles in February 1888. Apart from paintings, he also made some drawings because it was a cheaper medium. Theo encouraged him to submit to the Salon des Indépendants. In May Vincent rented a room in the Yellow House, even though he could hardly afford to do so, and continued to send his work to his brother. In June he became intrigued with the subject of the wheat harvest and painted The Sower (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo). On 23 October 1888, Gauguin arrived in Arles, at a time when van Gogh was having trouble with his eyesight. Gauguin encouraged him to paint from memory, which resulted in Memory of the Garden in Etten (Hermitage, St. Petersburg). The artists, however, had many disagreements, and during a dramatic quarrel on 23 December van Gogh mutilated his ear. He was taken into a hospital in Arles, and Gauguin left for Paris. Van Gogh recovered rapidly and was dismissed on 7 January 1889. In February his neighbors objected to his presence in the Yellow House, and he had to return to the hospital. In April Theo married Johanna Gesina Bonger, who would eventually safeguard most of Vincent's oeuvre. Aware of his mental problems, at the end of April van Gogh checked himself into the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy, where he was treated by Dr. Peyron. His condition was stable, and he was allowed to work in a makeshift studio. He worked in the garden (Irises, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) and painted the fields he could see from his window. Under supervision he painted in the countryside, rendering cypresses and olive trees. Starry Night (Museum of Modern Art, New York) also stems from this period. From July through September he suffered from a severe depression that prevented him from working. He resumed his work from October through December, painting well-known Provençal works and adapting prints after Delacroix (q.v.), Millet, and Rembrandt (1606-1669). In January 1890 he exhibited five works with Les XX in Brussels, selling one of them. After a visit to Arles at the end of February, he became ill again but continued to work. He finally left the asylum, and visited Theo in Paris on his way to Auvers, where he arrived on 20 May. He became close friends with Dr. Gachet and rented a room at the inn of the Ravoux family. He painted the village, portraits, and the surrounding wheat fields. On 27 July 1890, during an episode of depression, van Gogh shot himself in the chest and died two days later.

William Fraser Garden was born Garden William Fraser in Gillingham, Kent, on 10 June 1856. Six years after his family’s move to Bedford in 1861, he began to attend the local grammar school and, while there, studied art under Bradford Rudge. In 1872, he took up a position as a clerk in an insurance office, but gave up work there five years later in order to pursue a career as a watercolourist. He showed regularly at the Royal Academy from 1880, and appointed Messrs Dowdeswell, 133 New Bond Street, his agent in 1883.He stopped exhibiting in London in 1890.Moving with his parents to Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire, in 1887, Fraser Garden married and settled there two years later. However, always bad with money, he was declared bankrupt in 1899, a state of affairs that led, five years later, to his wife leaving him, with their six children. For the remainder of his life, he lived in a room at the Ferry Boat Inn, Holywell, where he continued to paint. He died at the County Hospital, Huntingdon, on 31 January 1921, after fracturing his spine in a fall.

Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in American art.

Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator. He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterised by the weight and density he exploited from the medium. He also worked extensively in watercolour, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.