William Bartram's Visual Wonders: The Drawings of an American Naturalist -- Elizabeth A. Athens, Paperback

Winner, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia 2024 Literary Award for Nonfiction

Pennsylvania naturalist William Bartram (1739-1823) is best known as the author of a travelogue describing his botanizing journey through the American South in the late eighteenth century. Writing was not, however, Bartram's only or even preferred method of recording the natural world around him. His deeply unconventional drawings, depicting sentient plants and hybrid organic forms, lie at the heart of his understanding of nature. With this book, Elizabeth Athens considers the strangeness of Bartram's graphic enterprise, exploring the essential role his renderings played in his natural history. For Bartram, the making and interpretation of figures on a surface was a dynamic and collaborative relationship between nature, the observing artist-naturalist, and the audience. This book offers the first in-depth investigation of Bartram's drawing practice as central to his understanding of nature. Through an examination of Bartram's approach to botanical and zoological representation, Athens highlights the struggle between different modes of seeing nature in eighteenth-century Enlightenment science.

Author: Elizabeth A. Athens
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 10/28/2025
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.40h x 6.70w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780822967613

About the Author
Elizabeth Athens is an art historian and curator based at the University of Connecticut. She has written extensively on the overlap of the arts and sciences in British North America and the United States, with a special focus on the visual and material culture of natural history. She has also been recognized nationally and internationally for her reinterpretation of the portrait galleries at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, which holds one of the most important collections of early American portraiture.