Correcting art with science: Victorian painting in Nature

Abstract

Recently, humanities scholars have investigated Victorian relations between humanities and science, focusing on science’s influence on the humanities. Less studied is how scientists viewed literature and art. From its inception, Nature regularly included scientists’ reviews on art shown at the annual Royal Academy London exhibition. I will examine how scientists writing in Nature read paintings and what motivated them to do this in a science publication. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison mark the relatively recent rise of scientific objectivity “circa 1860.” Nature was founded in 1869 and, focusing on botany, zoology, biology, meteorology, and astronomy, scientists attacked paintings they felt were factually incorrect and in the process suggested a rapprochement between science and visual art. Nature even ran two series on science for artists to “correct” artists’ landscape paintings. Scientists’ criticisms permit us to explore Victorian social and intellectual relations between scientists and artists, and determine how the supposed “two cultures” coexisted and dissented in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Two series on science for artists also reflected an educational mission for the public by demonstrating how science’s vast knowledge was vital even for art. Analyzing their exchanges in Nature explores both groups of practitioners’ cultural politics and attempts to reach wider audiences, gain footholds in university curricula, professionalize practitioners, and increase their cultural authority. I will conclude by noting parallel changes in science and art at the end of the nineteenth century away from empiricism and toward affective meanings in the external world, and how the journal realigned science–art relations in the twentieth century.