In his new book, Ordering the Myriad Things, Nicholas K. Menzies, research fellow in The Huntington's Center for East Asian Garden Studies, examines how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. This talk focuses especially on images of plants, contrasting their representation in late-imperial Chinese painting and materia medica to the conventions of scientific botanical drawing. It highlights the work and careers of three 20th-century Chinese artists who paved the way for today's professional botanical illustrators.
Ann Bermingham, professor emeritus at UC Santa Barbara, uncovers the methods used to create British drawings between the 17th and 19th centuries.
As a process of visual thinking, drawing is an art of discovery. This is true both for the artist who uses drawing to create an image and for...