“Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts”: A show at the Yale Center for British Art includes William Dyce’s painting of Pegwell Bay, on the Kent coast in England.
__________
Darwin referred to the “endless forms” that nature can produce without any pre-existing design: a vision that has turned out to be just as compelling for modernity as the notion of a preordained order was in earlier eras. But in this exhibition we find not the existential despair or cynicism we might expect following the dethroning of old beliefs, but an extravagant celebration of sense and sensation.
The excitement can be felt not only in the variegated colors of the feathers of birds of paradise gathered here on display, but also in the attempts to capture in paint the vibrancy, unpredictability and tragic grandeur of an untethered world.
__________
“Duria Antiquior (An Earlier Dorset),” by Robert Farren, circa 1850.
__________
“The Sick Monkey,” by William Henry Simmons after Edwin Landseer, 1875.
__________
“Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds,” by Martin Johnson Heade, 1871.
__________
“Head of the Flea,” by Lens Aldous, circa 1838.
The lust for exploration was accompanied by an almost fanatical attention to visual detail. There is an extraordinary poster-size image of the head of a flea created by Lens Aldous and used in an 1838 presentation at the Entomological Society of London, of which Darwin was vice president: a meticulous rendering of a magnified image.
__________
Full article and photos: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/arts/design/03muse.html
