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Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida and
the Bahamas Islands was the first natural history of American flora and
fauna. Issued between 1731 and 1743, this work would eventually include 220
prints, which systematically illustrated American birds, animals and plants
for the first time.
In 1712, Mark Catesby made his first trip to America to visit his sister who
lived in Virginia. He returned to England in 1719. On this trip Catesby became
intrigued with the strangeness and variety of American plants, birds and animals,
and decided to return again to the New World for another extended trip. For
this second visit he acquired a number of sponsors for whom he was to collect
and sketch botanical samples. Amongst his sponsors were William Sherard and
Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the British Museum. Catesby returned to America
in 1722 (moving on to Bermuda in 1725 as the guest of Governor Phenny). On this
trip he did collect the botanical samples for his sponsors, but he also took
to sketching the birds, plants and animals that he saw on his wanderings throughout
rural Southeastern America. Upon his return to England his friends and sponsors
encouraged him to publish a book of his drawings and notes, which he did beginning
in 1731. Catesby's Natural History was almost completely a one man show.
Not only did he do his own field research and sketches in his self-taught style,
but since he could not afford a professional engraver, Catesby took etching
lessons from Joseph Coupy and did his own etching of all the plates but two.
His intense personal involvement in the work did not stop there, for he even
supervised the coloring of the first edition prints, though for the second edition
his good friend George Edwards, an important natural scientist in his own right,
did the coloring.
Besides being the first to produce an American natural history, Catesby was
the first in a number of other items. He was the first to place his birds and
animals in their natural habitats, a style of natural history representation
that was later used by such artists as Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon.
He was the first to abandon the Indian names for his subjects, trying to establish
scientific names based on generic relationships. It is interesting to note that
the great Linnaeus, working on his Systema Naturae at this time, used
Catesby's work as the basis of his system of binomial nomenclature for American
species. For all these and many other reasons, these are magnificent prints
both for their beauty and significance. As Elsa G. Allen has said, the quality
of the work was so superior to foregoing accounts that Mark Catesby ranks as
the first real naturalist in America (American Ornithology Before Audubon,
p. 465).
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