The Maximus Gallery’s 30th Anniversary Exhibit
On April 27, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History (SBMNH) will open its Maximus Gallery for a unique nature-art-science-history exhibition to celebrate the gallery’s 30th anniversary and its patrons, Peggy and John Maximus. The exhibit is titled, Drawn from Nature: The Maximus Legacy, curated by Linda Miller, Maximus Gallery Curator.
The gallery collection holds 4,000 engravings and lithographs created by famous scientific illustrators from Europe and America during the 16th through 19th centuries. Organized thematically, the exhibit offers detailed depictions of plants, mammals, birds, marine life, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. There are species in the art works that were depicted prior to their extinction, such as the Passenger Pigeon drawn by Alexander Wilson (early 1800) and the Dodo bird (Didus ineptus) reproduced by George Edwards in his Gleanings of Natural History 1760.
On Friday I had the opportunity to interview Miller for the BTS details:
Q. How did the exhibit come about?
A. Because it is the 30th anniversary of the Maximus Gallery I decided to do a legacy tribute to our patron Peggy Maximus. She brought me to the curatorial position at the Museum 23 years ago and I knew her quite well. It is a special milestone for the gallery. The Maximus Wing was dedicated in 1995. It includes the gallery, a large office space for a Curator and Exhibit Designer, and a climate-controlled room where we store the art collection.
What was your selection criteria for the artwork in the exhibit?
I decided to show the array of subjects that make up the collection of antique natural history prints. I selected prints from each category that represent a sampling of artistic styles of illustration over the past 400 years. Our earliest prints are from an herbal illustration printed in 1547. I chose plants, mammals, birds, marine life, reptiles and amphibians and insects that showed the depth and variety of our collection. It was mainly an aesthetic choice really. Images that looked good together. None that dominated.
What are the various media on view in the exhibit?
Our collection is made up of works on paper. These are the illustrations that accompanied early natural histories. They are etchings, engravings, mezzotint, aquatint and lithographs; both hand-colored and color printed as printmaking techniques changed over the centuries.
With 57 works across seven categories of natural science, plants, mammals, birds, marine life, reptiles, amphibians, and insects – might there be a top five you would particularly recommend viewers take a longer look at, and why?
There are wonderful stories that can be told about each of the works in the gallery. The object labels tell the age of the work, the artist and title and where it was published.
I think people will be attracted to different prints for their own reasons. For the explanatory text panels, this time I tried to put in context the importance of illustration in the development of the sciences, rather than focusing on different artists as I’ve done in the past – in other words, the rise of botany or ornithology or entomology and the role illustration played.
For this specific type of artwork used to document science, are any works in the exhibit from science research done by the SBMNH?
Because our collection ranges from the 16th to 19th century, no works in the exhibit is from research done by our museum. However, any scientist today investigating a species that was first described using an illustration, must refer to the iconotype, the name given to the image on which the description of a new species is based.
Are any of the collection’s illustrations on loan to science organizations and/or universities for study and research?
No. But we just made available an online portal with a link for our website at https://maximusgallery.org that will make our collection more accessible to the public.
What do you want the viewer’s takeaway to be?
Hopefully people will be charmed by the range of how artists depicted nature and communicated in an earlier age. Some are beautiful, some quirky, some seem primitive, but all are fascinating. These works are extremely well documented, and I have a huge library of reference books in my office. As more libraries and museums are digitizing their collections, you can go to the internet and see the entire publication, page by page, scanned from the original complete work.
Is the SBMNH selling any of the works or miniature reprints?
I wish we could make reprints of our print collection available for purchase as some of the larger museums do, but not at this stage.
411: https://sbnature.org
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