Darwin Illustrations

Darwin Illustrations

The illustrations dispersed throughout this website and shown below are original drawings by Richard King, and were created for the Massachusetts Darwin Bicentennial Project. They were done in watercolor and ink on Arches hot pressed paper, each ~ 4” x6”. All images are copyrighted by Richard King ©2009, all rights reserved. They may be used free-of-charge for educational purposes, but for other uses please contact the artist directly at richard.king@williams.edu.

Richard King is a lecturer in Literature of the Sea at the Maritime Studies Program of Williams College and Mystic Seaport. He has written and illustrated numerous scholarly and popular articles, two children’s books, and drawn cartoons for over 100 of the Complete Idiot’s Guides.

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HMS Beagle Homeward Bound

“The Beagle now [Oct/Nov1835] was a happy ship. She was homeward bound. In the swell of the tropical Pacific she bowled along at the rate of 150 miles a day. With great good luck just before she sailed from the Galapagos she had fallen in with a little schooner from Guayaquil, and there had been a bag of mail for them aboard the vessel. They had fresh meat; eighteen live turtles were lying on their backs on the after deck. FitzRoy spent his time writing up his account of the voyage. ‘The Captain is daily becoming a happier man; he now looks forward with cheerfulness to the work which is before him.’ Darwin was busy in his cabin, that had now become a miniature laboratory, almost, you might say, a little natural history museum; every cranny was stuffed with snakes and insects in jars, the skins of birds and other creatures, and he sat at his table, pretty much as he was to sit for the rest of his life, with his microscope, his dissecting instruments and his notebooks before him.

Darwin, now nearly twenty-six, had changed in appearance since they had left Plymouth four years before; he had filled out, his head had become a little heavier, and in his manner there was more assurance and authority. His studies now possessed him absolutely. ‘I literally could hardly sleep at night for thinking over my day’s work,’ he wrote to Susan.”

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Moorehead, Alan. Darwin and the Beagle (Penguin, Harmondsworth: 1978), p.169.Amazon

Galapagos Giant Tortoise (saddleback)

Geochelone elephantopus

“In these obscure private papers…Darwin made his first, extremely ambiguous statement about the possibility of evolution.

When I recollect, the fact that from the form of the body, shape of scales & general size, the Spaniards can at once pronounce, from which Island any tortoise may have been brought, When I see these islands in sight of each other, & possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure & filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties. The only fact of a similar kind of which I am aware, is the constant asserted difference—between the wolf-like Fox of East and West Falkland Islds.—If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks the zoology of Archipelagoes—will be worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of Species.

As [Darwin] said many years later […here is when…] ‘vague doubts’ about the permanence of species flickered across his mind.”

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Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin: Voyaging, vol. 1 of a biography (Knopf, New York: 1995), p.339 Amazon; citation from Barlow, Nora. “Darwin’s ornithological notes.” Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Historical Series (1963, 2: p.262).

Female Damara Zebra and colt

Equus burcelli antiquorum

“I will, however, give one curious and complex case, not indeed as affecting any important character, but from occurring in several species of the same genus, partly under domestication and party under nature. It is a case apparently of reversion. The ass not rarely has very distinct transverse bars on its legs, like those on the legs of the zebra: it has been asserted that these are plainest in the foal, and from inquiries which I have made, I believe this to be true.

We see several very distinct species of the horse-genus becoming, by simple variation, striped on the legs like a zebra, or striped on the shoulders like an ass. In the horse we see this tendency strong whenever a dun tint appears—a tint which approaches to that of the general colouring of the other species of the genus. The appearance of the stripes is not accompanied by any change of form or by any other new character. We see this tendency to become striped most strongly displayed in hybrids from between several of the most distinct species…For myself, I venture confidently to look back thousands on thousands of generations, and I see an animal striped like a zebra, but perhaps otherwise very differently constructed, the common parent of our domestic horse, whether or not it be descended from one or more wild stocks, of the ass, the hemionus, quagga, and zebra.

Summary.—Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.”

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Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (D. Appleton and Co., New York: 1864 edition), pp. 147-150. Amazon

Crucifix Ground Beetle

Panagaeus crux-major

“But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them, and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow. I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose [‘a sacred Panagæus crux major’], so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”

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Darwin, Charles and Francis Darwin, ed. Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter Amazon, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters (John Murray, London: 1902), p.20; University of Cambridge. “The beetle Darwin couldn’t bear to lose.” (Darwin Correspondence Project, 2007: http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/content/view/134/1)

Nudibranch

Thecacera darwini

“In 1845, Charles Darwin was off the Chilean coast of South America. As ship’s naturalist on the Beagle he collected a variety of species which were then farmed out to specialists or housed in museums. As far as we know, only one nudibranch species was collected by him, and its fate is now unknown. However, it was mentioned twice in the literature, first by Alder & Hancock (1855), who identified it as a species of Thecacera collected by Darwin in the Chonos Archipelago, southern Chile, and then by Bergh (1883) who listed the undescribed species.

It took one hundred and five years before the Frenchwoman, Alice Pruvot-Fol, found on the shelves of the Natural History Museum in Paris several jars of Thecacera from Isla Hoste, Chile, and described the species which she named in honor of Charles Darwin. The color of these preserved species was unknown and although Ernst Marcus (1959) redescribed the species, he could only add that it had spots and yellow edgings.”

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Millen, Sarah. University of British Columbia. “Thecacera darwini.” (The Slug Site, 1999).

Female Galapagos Cactus Finch

Geospiza scandens

“These curious features [of the Galapagos Islands] were particularly well illustrated by the birds, and especially by what ultimately turned out to be 13 distinct species of small, rather dull-looking birds, all vaguely similar, but with very distinct beaks which seemed to allow them to specialise in different food sources ranging from nuts and seeds, through insects to fruits and flowers. These were what later became famous as ‘Darwin’s finches,’ although young Charles did not realize at the time just how important they were. In the absence of an official artist [‘Darwin had virtually no artistic talent’], the Galapagos fauna was not adequately illustrated at the time. The artist who eventually dealt with the islands’ birds, John Gould, probably never even saw the Beagle, let alone sailed on her; yet his contribution to the overall Beagle story was enormous. Unlike Darwin, Gould was an expert ornithologist and, again unlike Darwin, he recognized almost immediately the significance of the Galapagos finches.”

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Rice, Tony. Voyages of Discovery: Three Centuries of Natural History Exploration (The Natural History Museum, London: 2000), pp.232,235. Amazon

The Original Drawings for Sale for Charity

Over the course of 2009, we will be running a silent auction to sell the originals of these images, either separately or as a set, to raise money for The Massachussetts Darwin Bicentennial Project, a non-for profit organization. 100% of the purchase price will go to this charity. The images are signed and unframed.