Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World

The use of images as evidence in historical writing has been largely neglected by historians, though recent interest in the importance of visualization in scientific literature has led to a reappraisal of their value. In Drawn from Life, Victoria Dickenson uncovers a vast pictorial tradition of 'scientific illustration' that reveals how artists and writers from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century portrayed the natural history and landscape of North America to European readers. Dickenson undertakes a close reading of the images created by European artists, most of whom had never seen North America, and unravels the threads that linked the images to the curiosities and specimens that reached the Old World.