William Bartram
(9 Feb 1739 - 22 July 1823) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
William Bartram |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Kingsessing, PA, |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Birth: |
9 Feb 1739 |
| Death: |
22 July 1823 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
Naturalist and draughtsman. |
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Biography
| The son of the Pennsylvania naturalist John Bartram (1699-1777), he executed his first drawings in the 1750s as illustrations to his fathers observations on the flora and fauna of North America. Bartram accompanied his father on numerous collecting trips in the north-eastern colonies and on an expedition to Florida in 1765. His drawings were disseminated to European naturalists by his fathers friend and colleague Peter Collinson (1694-1768), an English merchant who was an important promoter of natural science in the 18th century. Compositionally, Bartrams early works were structured after etchings by the English naturalists Mark Catesby and George Edwards (1694-1773). These artists were among the first to present organisms as part of their larger physical habitatsa‚ťa practice that Bartram carried forward in his own work, challenging the traditional notion that organisms can be defined solely according to their own physical attributes. Through his drawings Bartram explored the complex interchange that occurs between animals and plants and their environmental contexts, defying the notion that individual organisms fall naturally into an abstract, hierarchical chain of being. He characteristically employed an undulating line that imparts energy to all the elements of a scene, suggesting that the whole of organic creation is united by a single, animated spirit. Bartrams works were greatly admired by European naturalists, and he won the patronage of Margaret Cavendish-Bentinck (1715-85), 2nd Duchess of Portland, and the botanist Dr John Fothergill (1712-80). In March 1773, with Fothergills support, Bartram set out alone on an expedition to Florida that ultimately took him 3900 km across the American South, collecting seeds and making drawings. The detailed journals that Bartram kept of his explorations served as the basis for his Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791). Like his drawings, this highly poetic work creates a picture of a spiritually unified cosmos that came to influence English and American Romantic thinkers, from William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.After his return from the South, Bartram was approached by the recently established University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, to serve as the first Professor of Botany; he was also approached several times by the federal government to accompany expeditions into unexplored regions of the country. Bartram preferred, however, to work quietly in his fathers experimental garden, tutoring the next generation of Philadelphia naturalists who visited him there and for whom he served as an essential model; his students included Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815), who took the professorial post he had rejected and who commissioned him to draw illustrations for the first textbook on American plants, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia, 1803). Bartram also served as a mentor to Charles Willson Peale and his children. Bartram encouraged Alexander Wilson to begin to draw birds and joined with Peale in helping Wilson to produce his American Ornithology, the first study devoted entirely to American birds. |
Samples of Work
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