Images of Nature Gallery

Natural History Museum, London. From 21 January 2011.

A display of rare and fragile illustrations selected from the world's largest collection of natural history paintings and drawings opened this week in a new gallery at London's Natural History Museum.

Restored to its nineteenth-century glory — with terracotta-tiled walls and mahogany display cabinets designed by the museum's original architect, Alfred Waterhouse — the gallery hosts temporary exhibitions of light-sensitive watercolours and prints alongside permanent hangings of oil paintings from the museum's vast collection.

The museum's holdings of 500,000 zoological and botanical illustrations include two copies of John James Audubon's nineteenth-century masterpiece Birds of America, containing 435 hand-coloured engravings. The work became the world's most expensive book in December 2010, when another copy was auctioned for £7.3 million (US$11.5 million).

A macaw, one of more than 2,000 watercolours commissioned by John Reeves in the 1800s. Credit: NAT. HIST. MUS.

Owing to the fragility of works on paper and lack of a suitable exhibition space, few items from the collection have been routinely displayed to the public. A different theme will be chosen each year. This year it is China: 96 watercolours drawn from 2,000 natural history paintings from Canton (now Guangzhou) will be shown.

The paintings were commissioned by John Reeves, a tea inspector for the British East India Company and a keen amateur natural historian. Between 1812 and 1831, he employed local Chinese artists to paint plants and animals he found in markets and gardens. Reeves shipped the watercolours to botanical gardens, horticultural societies and other patrons in Britain. A contemporary take on his collection is offered by the gallery's recent artist-in-residence, Shanghai-based Hu Yun, who reflects through drawings and video on the irony that the watercolours that enabled taxonomists to identify and name new species were painted by anonymous Chinese artists.

The displays also juxtapose microscopic views old and new. A small engraving of a human flea, observed under an early compound microscope by Robert Hooke and described in his Micrographia (1665) as “adorn'd with a curiously polish'd suite of sable Armour, neatly jointed”, holds its own against a huge image of a bluebottle by contemporary artist Giles Revell, based on scanning electron micrographs.

Another pair of paintings highlights the importance of scientific accuracy in natural history illustration. In a reworked version beside the original, palaeontologist and artist Julian Hume shows how a 1626 oil painting of a dodo, attributed to Flemish artist Roelandt Savery, misled scientists and the public for 400 years. Richard Owen, the Natural History Museum's first superintendent, placed fossil bones over the seventeenth-century painting to determine the layout of the bird's skeleton, and his interpretation, published in 1866, became the recognized scientific description of the dodo. Its rounded body, stout legs, huge head and small wings became a comic cipher for extinction. But Hume shows that the painting was inaccurate. He depicts a more streamlined dodo with longer legs, based on his examination of new fossil finds, contemporary accounts and studies of the anatomy of other flightless birds.