Figuring a World: William Bartram's Natural History

This dissertation examines how the act of drawing provided a model for William Bartram's natural history. Bartram (1739-1823) approached drawing as a means of discovery, a form of cognition, and an act of imaginative collaboration and memory. Influenced by John Locke, Joseph Addison, and William Hogarth, he understood "figuring" as a series of reciprocal interactions among natural world, artist-naturalist, and observer, an understanding that coincided with his view of a dynamic, perpetually shifting cosmos.;Key eighteenth-century epistemological theories, aesthetic treatises, and natural histories provide the context for this study, with particular attention paid to the emergent theory of vitalism. Vitalism, which held that all matter was infused with an animating force, recast nature as animate and mutable and laid the groundwork for nascent ecological thought. Though the term "ecology" is of nineteenth-century origin, the study of the natural world's relationships---rather than the categorization of purportedly isolatable "essences"-emerges in the eighteenth. Bartram's graphic work acknowledges this affinity between drawing and an interconnected natural world.;In short, Bartram presented a new mode of natural history representation, one intended to accommodate nature's flux. His drawings call attention to their construction through visual quotations, jostling perspectives, and unusual flourishes, and demand the viewer's active engagement. Rather than serve as transparent windows onto the natural world, Bartram's drawings function as extensions of its organic processes and patterns.