heeey. So I'm at university for art right now, and my drawing final is hopefully gonna be inspired by the drawings of natural historian of the past. I was wondering if you knew of any good resources for that. Preferably the black ink drawings, less modern-medical textbook illustrations and more out-in-the-field-have-a-glimpse-of-a-rare-species-and-needa-sketch-it-NOW. if you know of any.
I'm not sure what the best resource would be for old field sketches, aside from illustrated biographies of famous natural history artists.
One of my favorite singular field sketches was by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, when she realized she had a fish that was supposed to have been long-extinct on her hands...
Many of Louis Aggasiz Fuerte's paintings were actually done right out in the field - not specimens or menagerie animals. He never had many base sketches preserved, from what I've read, and he didn't even make any base sketches in the first place for many of his illustrations.
Darwin, of course, had many sketches preserved, and his are some of the best "on the fly" pen sketching examples I can think of, even though not all of them were from the field - he just sketched what he was thinking of and didn't professionally illustrate things. His work in "Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals" is particularly, er, "interesting". The full book can be found here.