Buxton Books is proud to be the bookseller for The Charleston Library Society as they welcome Henrietta McBurney for her latest collection, Illuminating Natural History: The Art and Science of Mark Catsby. This is a ticketed event. To purchase ticket, please click here.
Illuminating Natural History is not only the name of renowned art historian and curator Henrietta McBurney’s latest book; it’s also one of her driving missions. Fortunately, for a night, she’ll be at The Charleston Library Society taking us all along for the ride. Come explore the life and art of the 18th-century naturalist Mark Catesby, and his pioneering work depicting the flora and fauna of North America, in vibrant detail with CLS on Tuesday, April 4, at 6pm.
Tickets are $10 for Members, $15 for Guests. To purchase tickets, please click here.
About Henrietta McBurney:
Henrietta is an art historian and curator. She worked ascurator of prints and drawings in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle between 1983 and 2002, and subsequently as keeper of fine and decorative art at Eton College, the Garrick Club, London, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She now works free-lance for Cambridge colleges, lectures, and co-teaches a course on ‘Pioneers of Natural History Illustration’ for the Oak Spring Library Foundation, Virginia. She has published widely on aspects of natural history illustration, including catalogues raisonné on the Florilegium of Alexander Marshal and the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. Her most recent publication is Illuminating Natural History: The Art and Science of Mark Catesby.
About Illuminating Natural History:
The life and art of the 18th-century naturalist Mark Catesby, and his pioneering work depicting the flora and fauna of North America, are explored in vibrant detail.
This book explores the life and work of the celebrated eighteenth-century English naturalist, explorer, artist and author Mark Catesby (1683–1749). During Catesby’s lifetime, science was poised to shift from a world of amateur virtuosi to one of professional experts. Working against a backdrop of global travel that incorporated collecting and direct observation of nature, Catesby spent two prolonged periods in the New World – in Virginia (1712–19) and South Carolina and the Bahamas (1722–6). In his majestic two-volume Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–43), esteemed by his contemporary John Bartram as ‘an ornament for the finest library in the world’, he reflected the excitement, drama and beauty of the natural world. Interweaving elements of art history, history of science, natural history illustration, painting materials, book history, paper studies, garden history and colonial history, this meticulously researched volume brings together a wealth of unpublished images as well as newly discovered letters by Catesby, which, with their first-hand accounts of his collecting and encounters in the wild, bring the story of this extraordinary pioneer naturalist vividly to life.