Art by Charles Darwin

Life Drawing from Ape to Human: Charles Darwin's Theories of Evolution and William Rimmer's Art Anatomy
by Elliott Bostwick Davis

The impact of Darwin's theories of evolution on the visual arts of nineteenth-century America has been considered primarily in the context of American landscape painting. Citing the year 1859, which marked the death of world-renowned naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, the London publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, and the first public exhibition in New York City of Frederic Church's monumental painting, The Heart of the Andes, Barbara Novak and Stephen J. Gould describe the links between Humboldt and Darwin and the landscape paintings of Church.1 Darwin's theories, however, also had a significant impact on the development of life drawing in the United States. click to see larger image

published in 1877, represents the most comprehensive anatomy book issued in the United States at the time and provides new insight into the influence of Darwin's evolutionary theory on artistic practice.2 Rimmer's drawing book is largely unknown owing to the ethnographic nature of the publication, yet it is precisely this approach that furthers our understanding of the reception of Darwin's theories in the United States during the 1870s.

To fully appreciate the revolutionary nature of Rimmer's Art Anatomy, it is essential to understand the broader context of drawing books available in the United States when the work appeared.3 Despite the prevalence of American drawing books—an estimated 145, 000 were in circulation in the United States prior to the Civil War— Rimmer's Art Anatomy was unprecedented for its extensive descriptions and drawings of the anatomy of men, women, and children and for its associations with Darwinian theories of evolution and emotion in man and animals.4 Rimmer clearly incorporated elements of existing American anatomy texts. Rimmer's first drawing book, Elements of Design, 1864 (fig. 1), recalls the approach to male proportions in British-born printmaker and artist John Rubens Smith's A Key to the Art of Drawing the Human Figure, 1831, and he included similar diagrams in the final section of Art Anatomy (fig. 2) devoted to depicting proportions in men, women, and children. Winslow Homer's graphite drawing of a male nude, likely produced while he briefly studied drawing in New York City around 1860, reveals similar proportions for the figure, suggesting such a method was known to practicing artists.5

The first section of Art Anatomy depicts the head and skull in a manner that suggests Rimmer's awareness of the most popular nineteenth-century publication of its kind, John Gadsby Chapman's American Drawing Book (first issued in 1847 and in numerous subsequent editions through the 1870s). On page two, Rimmer includes several views of the human head looking up and down, an approach that Chapman clearly copied from an earlier French drawing book, Jombert's Methods of Drawing (1755). Exercise No. 18 on page two suggests that Rimmer superimposed Chapman's view onto one diagram, for which he instructs the reader to find the circles and describe the form of the head seen from above and below.