Specimen Boxes and Books of Nature: Titian Peale's Forms of Natural History

In “Specimen Boxes and Books of Nature: Titian Peale’s Forms of Natural History,” Ellery Foutch examines Titian Ramsey Peale’s lifelong fascination with depicting butterflies and moths across a range of media, from... [ view full abstract ]

In “Specimen Boxes and Books of Nature: Titian Peale’s Forms of Natural History,” Ellery Foutch examines Titian Ramsey Peale’s lifelong fascination with depicting butterflies and moths across a range of media, from watercolor sketches, lithographs, and oil paintings to illustrated books. Her paper explores Peale’s creation of over a hundred specimen boxes bound in leather and marbled paper, with preserved butterflies arranged between layers of glass. Due to its highly visible metamorphosis, the butterfly was a symbol of change, transformation, and the evanescence of beauty; yet the structured compositions of Peale’s butterfly boxes also imposed order, control, and symmetry during a climate of drastic upheaval: population increase, territorial expansion, urbanization, and the economic and technological developments of the nineteenth century. Peale's preservation of butterflies was an attempt to forestall their decay, transforming them from natural creatures that interacted with their environments into static, aesthetic objects. The form of the book-box invoked not only the trope of the “book of nature” but also the tensions between the limits of human representation (illustrations and textual description) and the infinite complexities of nature.