Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision - Paperback

by Amy R. W. Meyers (Editor), Margaret Beck Pritchard (Editor)

Completed in 1747, Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands was the first major illustrated publication on the flora and fauna of Britain's American colonies. Together with his Hortus Britanno-Americanus (1763), which detailed plant species that might be transplanted successfully to British soil, Catesby's Natural History exerted an important, though often overlooked, influence on the development of art, natural history, and scientific observation in the eighteenth century.
Inspired by a major traveling exhibition of Catesby's watercolor drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, this collection of interdisciplinary essays considers Catesby's endeavors as a naturalist-artist, scientific explorer, experimental horticulturist, ornamental gardener, and early environmental thinker in terms of the interests held by the various, overlapping communities in which he functioned -- particularly as those interests related to the British colonial enterprise.
The contributors are David R. Brigham, Joyce E. Chaplin, Mark Laird, Amy R. W. Meyers, Therese O'Malley, and Margaret Beck Pritchard.

Front Jacket

Original essays examine the broad influence of Mark Catesby--England s explorer artist--on the devlopment of natural history, art, and scientific observation in the 18th-century.

Author Biography

Amy R. W. Meyers is curator of American art at The Henry E. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. Margaret Beck Pritchard is curator of prints, maps, and wallpaper at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Virginia.