Vis, naar links 1775 - 1833

Jean Bernard made this drawing, "Fish, to the left," with pen in gray and brown and brush in gray and brown, sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s. Its careful rendering of the fish's scales and fins remind us that the production of scientific illustrations was a booming trade in the Netherlands at this time. As the Dutch Republic became more involved in global trade, the natural sciences emerged as a popular field of study, and artists were commissioned to make drawings of exotic plants and animals to be included in scholarly publications. Drawings such as this one are especially useful for historians like me, because we can compare them to written accounts from the period and to later scientific analyses in order to understand the ways that European knowledge of the natural world changed over time. This drawing tells us a lot about the way the Dutch understood nature and their place within it.