The Art of science: a ‘Rediscovery’ of the Lister Copperplates

Abstract

In 1712 Martin Lister bequeathed the collection of more than 1000 copperplates to the University of Oxford that he used for his Historiae Conchyliorum , the first comprehensive study of conchology. In the mid-eighteenth century, William Huddesford, keeper of the Bodleian Library, used the copperplates to create another edition of Historiae , but after that they are not mentioned again in the published literature. I recently ‘rediscovered’ the plates in the Bodleian Library, since their transfer from the Ashmolean Museum in 1860. I use historical analysis, as well as a selective study of the copperplates with X-ray fluorescence techniques, to examine a portion of the plates and the process of their production. I show that Martin Lister's daughter engraved a paper for Philosophical Transactions , and demonstrate that she was among the first female scientific illustrators to use a microscope. Furthermore, one of the Lister copperplates may be the last survivor of those engraved for Philosophical Transactions , the rest having been surrendered to the nation in World War I. The significant intellectual and artisanal challenges presented to a skilful naturalist in the transformation of a field specimen into an aesthetically pleasing illustration as well as a scientific object conveying taxonomic information are delineated.

The Early Royal Society and Visual Culture

“…William Lodge, an amateur etcher and draughtsman (Griffiths 2004c;Pierce 2016) and his friend Francis Place (Tyler 1971) did some of the drawings for Martin Lister's papers submitted to the Royal Society (Roos 2011b, pp. 175-78, 275-76), while Lister's own daughters drew or engraved images for his study of shells (Woodley 1994;Roos 2011a). Katherine Molyneux, wife of the Fellow Thomas Molyneux, and sister of Hugh Howard, the Irish portrait painter, collector and also a Fellow (Lauze 2004), made drawings accompanying her husband's papers that were sent to the Royal Society (Hoppen 2008, 1: 266n6, 314n11) where Lhuyd referred to his "designer" without naming him as one who had "never practiced before his journey, but seems to improve daily" (Lhuyd 1698, p. 280).…”