Author: Olivia Buehler
Tucked away in an annex of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, amongst the vast collection of anthropological specimens, one can also find the museum’s Natural History Art collection, including these curious painted fish. As an intern of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History working under HAA faculty and CMNH assistant curator, Deirdre Smith, I spent my semester with this collection helping to research its many artists, update and digitize its inventory, and research contemporary artists that could help diversify the collection. Along the way, I began to develop lots of questions about the intersections between the disciplines of art history and natural history, especially when looking at works like the one pictured above. Looking closely, you can see that these are not just paintings of fish, but dehydrated fish specimens, acquired from the Oglebay Institute in West Virginia, that were then painted, matted, and stored along with the more traditional paintings, drawings and prints of this collection. So then, how do we distinguish between scientific specimens and art? Is an illustration in a textbook’s artistic value different from that of an original painting? Why or why not?
Within the collection exists a range of media typical to the discipline of natural history art to completely atypical, from prints of birds affiliated with the Audubon Society and original watercolors of corresponding textbook illustrations, to human figure drawings and memorabilia related to the museum like old photographs and marketing designs. As I sifted through the drawers of the collection, photographing and allocating each object into the digitized inventory, I couldn’t help but think about my studies of art history and how they related to the more scientific subjects of the works I was exploring. What I discovered is that the distinction between the two disciplines I was interacting with is blurred and that many of the artists in this collection have made important contributions to both art and natural history. At first, some works may appear to be strictly representational, perhaps of a certain bird or fish species, and made for scientific publication or study. However, closer examinations reveal individual, nuanced artist style characteristic of specific artists and informed by their unique backgrounds. One specific artist I especially enjoyed studying is Winifred Austen, a British artist who painted watercolors of British birds for textbooks, but whose pleasant, impressionistic style and rendering of birds as dynamic components within their respective environments made major contributions to the practice of wildlife illustration.
When I first pulled these fish specimens from their drawer, I thought it was quite strange that they would be part of a Natural History Art collection, but after the work I did this semester and learning how to bridge the gap between art and natural histories, I think they effectively, however oddly, represent the necessary juxtaposition of two great disciplines happening within the Carnegie Museum of Natural History today.
Olivia Buehler, Museum Studies Intern at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Spring 2024