Charles Darwin

During the Victorian age, the rise of naturalist illustration coincided with a burgeoning interest in the scientific world both within and outside of London. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) inspired scientists to examine and catalogue the world’s animals. With Victorian women’s fashion owing much to the millinery, or hat-making, trade, the birds whose feathers adorned those hats also came under inspection. Ornithologists such as John Gould, Francis Morris, and Henry Dresser published in-depth, encyclopedic volumes on avian species in London and abroad. Naturalist…

After George Eliot's death, French artist Paul Adolphe Rajon (1843-1888) etched this portrait of her for reproduction, basing it on the 1865 chalk drawing by Sir Frederic William Burton. This was one of the few images of Eliot that George Walter Cross approved for public dissemination, and it was featured in the first volume of Cross's publication George Eliot's Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals (Cross 1885, 1: frontispiece). Rajon's oeuvre also includes etchings of portraits of John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin…