This MEMS endowment, established to honor the scholarship, teaching, and mentorship of Professor Emerita Diane Owen Hughes, is used exclusively to support graduate research and travel. Recipients of these funds will be known as Diane Owen Hughes Scholars.
MEMS was pleased to award the 2025 Diane Owen Hughes Scholarships to Genevra Higginson.
This summer, the Diane Owens Hughes Scholarship enabled me to travel to New York to participate in the 2025 Morgan Drawing Institute graduate seminar, 'Drawing Nature, 1500-1900'. The program was led by Sarah Mallory, Curator of Drawings at the Morgan; Olivia Dill, Curatorial Fellow at the Morgan; and Roberta Olson, Emerita Curator of Drawings at the NewYork Historical Society. Though the Morgan invited applicants from across fields (the history of art, the history of science, and works on paper conservation) and institutions, they did not have funds to support travel and housing for participants from out of town. The support from MEMS supported the entirety of my participation.
The seminar drew from the Morgan Library & Museum's deep collection of natural history drawings by artists working in the Netherlands, Germany, England, France, and the Americas, from roughly 1450-1850. These objects served as points of entry into the ways in which artmaking informs—and is informed by—systems of knowledge production. Through this object-oriented approach, the seminar explored the particular ways that drawing praxis is inflected by developing techniques of observation and scientific record keeping.
Careful consideration of natural history drawings, and the prism through which they refract historical and ongoing tensions between fine art connoisseurship and science, is key to my research. Indeed, that tension is an overarching theme in my dissertation, which follows etching, radiating outwards from early modern France, to examine human-flora relationships on material and epistemic levels. I shift traditional narratives around etching’s ability to capture the liveliness of an artist’s hand—and its attendant proximity to drawing—to the medium’s capacity for representing plant life, arguing that etching’s naturalism has medial and semiotic reverberations with inflection points in natural histories.
The etchings that inform my study are uncolored, though many are based off of red chalk drawings and/or watercolor drawings on vellum. To date, most of my research has focused on the specifics of printmaking technologies and materials. But, of course, those histories are inextricable from drawing praxis. Therefore, the chance to study, in person, drawings that were part of the visual milieu in which "my" etchings were produced, was important from both historical and artmaking perspectives.
One of the highlights of the seminar was a session devoted to technical art history in the Morgan's Thaw Conservation Center. There, we examined a sketchbook attributed to Jacques le Moyne de Morgues (1533?-1588) using infra-red reflectography [Fig.s 1-2]. Le Moyne made his sketches with gouache and touches of silver and gold watercolor on paper. Because certain pigments are translucent in infra-red light, its use revealed black chalk underdrawings that are otherwise obscured by the gouache. In this way, the non-invasive technique reveals glimpses into the artistic process—allowing us to visually "peel back" layers of the artistic palimpsest.
Two conservators at the Morgan, Reba Snyder and Becca Pollak, also showed us some of the materials they were working on with Olivia Dill. Dill's research investigates the use of iridescent colors in the prints and drawing of American insects by Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), among others. A problem faced by Merian and her peers was that the color of gold—often applied as gold leaf over bole in natural history illustration—is affected by the alloy composition and the color below. Dill showed us samples of the alternative she identified in Merian's artworks: shell gold. To use in works on paper and vellum, shell gold is hand crushed; however, it is not as lustrous as leaf gold when mixed with gum arabic, a standard binder in early modern Europe. Instead, Merian added animal glue to her shell gold in order to better distribute the crushed particles, since this binder evens their suspension.
After the visit to the conservation center, we returned to the Morgan's Drawing Study Center, where we got to pore over artworks by Merian, such as the "Black Tegu Lizard(Tupinambis teguixin)" (ca. 1707-1715) [Fig. 3]. Here, Dill demonstrated how her research combines technical and social art history by drawing attention to the labor named and unnamed, seen and unseen, in the production of natural history illustration. For example, Dill pointed out that, although Merian writes explicitly about the assistance of Black enslaved individuals (often women) in collecting specimens in Suriname, the images based off the specimens show no markers of the enslaved labor that was necessary for their production.
Other artworks on display as interlocutors in our discussions included Jacob de Gheyn's "Studies of a Fantastic Bird, Toad, Frog, and Dragonfly" (ca. 1596-1602); watercolors byMadelein Françoise Basseport (1701-1780) made during her tenure as the royal botanical painterunder Louis XV and Louis XVI; a black chalk drawing of an elephant's forequarters by Rembrandt (1606-1669); to Beatrix Potter's watercolor, "Leaves and Flowers of the Orchid Cactus" (1886); and preparatory sketches of mammals by John James Audubon (1785-1851).
It was a sumptuous, thought-provoking day of engagement with drawings and the people who study and care for them. Participating in the seminar was an invaluable opportunity to think expansively about the relationship between art and science, and to do so through a hands-on, technical art historical lens. Learning from conservators, curators, and other students of natural history illustration reflected not only the type of collaborative research I aim to conduct, but also the type of collaborative work that defined the early modern book illustration process that is the nexus of my dissertation. I continue to benefit from the ideas and connections made that day, and I am very grateful that the Diane Owen Hughes Scholarship is what brought me there.
