Nature

Everything that there is to know about E. Wheeler, the mysterious turn of the century English mushroom artist of Clevedon & the Severn Valley.

The signature, E. Wheeler appears on the bottom right hand corner of most of the grey pages these mushrooms sit...

Dr. Arnold Dodel-Port, was a Swiss socialist botanist, a freethinker and champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He was also an exquisite artist who made the plant systematics of organisms (such as the Volvox Globator) mind bendingly beautiful.

During the late 1800s, in German speaking countries, the Swiss botanist, Dr. Arnold Dodel-Port was the David Attenborough of his...

FACT: Plankton is actually pretty. The free-living unarmored dinoflagellata of Charles Atwood Kofoid (1865-1947).

Charles Atwood Kofoid (1865-1947), was born on a farm near Granville, Illinois, five years after his father, a cabinetmaker, sailed...

Mr. J. (or S) Springsguth’s coloured etchings (1833) let you see what a variety of fossilised madrepores actually feels like.

Time has so nearly erased the biography of J. Springsguth that beyond that wonderful name there’s virtually nothing. “J” is...

Nature Obscurity

Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny & his Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911). Part Number One : In which we see Kny’s more colourful physiology artworks of mushroom & fern.

It began in the early 1860s and as a student in Berlin when German botanist, Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny (1841-1916), started...

FACT : You don’t want to read a book about the zoology and comparative anatomy of rare Italian sea planariums. Not when you can look at these pictures from Arnold Lang’s 1884’s “The polyclades of the Gulf of Naples” instead.

Arnold Lang (1855 – 1914) was a Swiss naturalist, a comparative anatomist and student of the German biologist, Ernst Haeckel. From...

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), born in Pennsylvania, travelled to HummingbirdOrchidWorld and stayed.

Martin Johnson Heade was an American painter known for his salt marsh landscapes, seascapes, and depictions of tropical birds (such...

Gautier d’Agoty (1716–1785). His art was described as “arrogance and charlatanery” and his studio looked like a Jack the Ripper crime scene. Take a good look at yourself.

Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty (1716–1785) was a French anatomist, painter and printmaker who, as part of his practice, had his...

Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny & his Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911). Part Number Two : In which Kny pares back his already minimal colour palette to create for us a more mono/duotone mushroom, fern & algae experience.

These images are University instructional posters. They come from a series entitled Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911) by Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny (1841-1916). ...

Prancing horse & animal combat. The hunting de Hamiltons, violently vivid 18th-century painters. The brothers, Philipp Ferdinand & Johann Georg.

It’s thought that Philipp was born around 1664, in Brussels, and that his father, the Scottish painter James de Hamilton,...

Norway’s Amaldus Clarin Nielsen (1838 – 1932), Norway’s first naturalist painter had a superpower. How the son of an absentee shipmaster with 11 children came to be a Knight, 1st Class.

Amaldus Clarin Nielsen (1838 – 1932), was born in Halse, Norway, the son of a shipmaster and merchant, grew up...