Saturday, April 8th
Rackham Building,
East Conference Room

10:00-11:45am Scholarly Panel

"Immortality and the Archive; or, Finding Life in the Art of William Bartram"

Description:
At Historic Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia sits the McKinley Papers, three lawyer’s boxes full of notes, typescripts, transcriptions, and clippings on the naturalist William Bartram (1739-1823). The American Philosophical Society has on file an edition of John Bartram’s correspondence that was declined for publication but placed on deposit. When the Bartram scholar Francis Harper died, the University of Kansas acquired his voluminous collection. A notorious packrat, Harper left amongst his scholarly work (which includes an unpublished biography) carbon copies of nearly every letter from his adult life, junk mail, and (according to one colleague) old shaving supplies. When I agreed to edit William Bartram’s manuscripts, I never realized that I was entering a graveyard.

Archival research forces one to consider how we spend our days. Editorial decisions numb the imagination, reducing scholarly preoccupations to punctuation and provenance. The intimacy of a manuscript, by contrast, can close a gap across centuries. Having followed an author through his tentative missteps and epiphanies, I feel closer to him than to my own first cousins. Bartram often left specimens in the pages of his scientific references. When I stumbled across a dried flower in the margins of John Clayton’s Flora Virginica, time stood still.

This talk addresses the aesthetics of vivification in William Bartram’s art. His scientific drawings represent an ongoing effort to depict not just physical properties for the sake of identification (pistils, stamens, etc.) but also the vitality of nature observed in the field. His earliest work includes turtles in the 1758 Gentleman’s Magazine (figure 1, forthcoming), which appear to be uncharacteristically static. The images are abstracted in space, set alongside coins from an archeological dig. His alligator snapping turtle shows external characteristics but gives no sense of habits or behavior. His better known drawings from the 1770s, by contrast, incorporate a decade of living and traveling through the American Southeast; images such as his “Sarracenia” tread the wild liminal space between plant and animal worlds (figure 2). From the 1790s through the early 1800s, Bartram continued to speculate upon the animal properties of flora, and more broadly, the affections shared across all living creation. His illustrations for Benjamin Smith Barton’s Elements of Botany (1804) exhibit this combination of technical expertise and emotion. Appearing as a frontispiece for Barton’s book, the Sarracenia purpurea served not only a scientific purpose, but testified to Barton’s friendship (figure 3).

This quality of vivification leads to an obvious but somehow overlooked point: pastorals dwell upon immortality. Nature writing has always dealt with themes of life and death. Much as pastoral poetry served a mourning function, then, it is a certain need for transcendence that may fuel our search for environmental traditions today. William Bartram’s alligator snapping turtle reminds me of the one that I shoved off the tarmac in West Alabama; his bladder wort and pitcher plants, of Apalachicola National Forest; the Dionaea takes me back to a Spring afternoon when I searched for a blossom on my hands and knees in Wilmington, North Carolina. The art has come to intersect with my own lived experience.

Nature cuts across time in botanic art. Bartram knew that, and so his drawings move us with their eternal, delicate bloom.

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Publications:
From the Fallen Tree (U.of North Carolina Press)