Items

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  Camp of the Chorographic Commission in Yarumito, Colombia.

  This watercolor was created by Venezuelan Carmelo Fernández (1809–87), one of the three official draftsmen and painters of the Chorographic Commission, an ambitious Colombian enterprise to map the country, including its mineral resources, between 1850 and 1859. The Commission was led by the Italian born Agustín Codazzi (1793–1859), who involved members of his family: his wife Araceli de la Hoz served as de facto quartermaster, chief logistician, and hostess, while his daughter Constanza and her siblings assisted with reproducing maps. His sons Domingo and Lorenzo also participated in the group’s explorations. The Commission counted on interpreters, porters, muleteers, peons, baqueanos, all led by the butler José Domingo Carrasquel. The watercolor shows a character with a spyglass, presumably a naturalist, and the daily life of the camp, where it was necessary to cook, care for horses and mules, organize samples, notes and reports, as well as pitch and repair tents. Observations were not made in a vacuum, requiring numerous assistants, go-betweens, and wider support networks to make it possible to look, interpret, measure, and collect.
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  The Saint Domingue Albums

  Between 1766 and 1784, René Gabriel de Rabié, an engineer who worked in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti), painted over 320 watercolours of plants and animals. His natural history enterprise was aided by multiple collaborators including his daughter and grandson and numerous unnamed enslaved people who collected and prepared specimens, and assisted in their preservation and depiction. De Rabié identified his specimens using both French and Kréyol names, and provided observations of habitat, distribution and behaviours. His daughter and grandson added glosses to the works, which were bound in Paris in the mid-19th century. De Rabié was one of a number of French naturalists whose work informed the natural histories of Buffon and the scientists of the Jardin des plantes in Paris. The watercolours themselves survived the depredations of insects and the Caribbean climate, revolutions in Haiti and France, transatlantic crossings, and rejection by the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, to be offered for sale by a rare book dealer in England, where they were examined by a curator at the Smithsonian, and acquired in 1930 by Dr Casey Wood, founder of the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection at McGill University Library in Montreal. The Saint Domingue Albums are evidence of the intersection of European, Caribbean, and African ways of understanding the natural world. The survival of the watercolours in the albums speak to the importance accorded to the culture of natural history in the colonial French Caribbean. In collaboration with historians, artists, ornithologists, entomologists, and botanists in Canada, Haiti, the United States, Italy and France, de Rabié’s collection is becoming part of the global history of natural history. Thanks to partnerships with La Sociéte haïtienne d'histoire, de géographie et de géologie and Le Jardin botanique des Cayes (Haiti), it is becoming a resource for the study of Haiti’s history and environment, accessible in English, French and Kreyol.