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■ B O O K Q U A R T E R LY
LOVELY BONES
Two new museum books pull back the curtain on Philadelphia s place at the intersection of art and science.
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18 | P H I L A D E L P H I A C I T Y PA P E R |
F E B R U A R Y 2 3 - F E B R U A R Y 2 9 , 2 0 1 2 | C I T Y PA P E R . N E T
■ B Y P AT R I C K R A P A
here are two new oversize books about Philadelphia’s role as the early hub of American science, and it’s no surprise that both include Charles Willson Peale’s 1822 self-portrait The Artist in his Museum. Peale, a Revolutionary War soldier and Philadelphia resident, was a key figure in putting the city and fledgling nation on the scientific map, particularly by opening the Philadelphia Museum, the first public museum of art and science in America, in 1786. The painting itself, in which the sternbrowed artist lifts a heavy velvet curtain to offer a peek into his overstuffed collection of art and taxidermy, is currently hanging at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The new pair of coffee-table crushers that reprint it, however, belong to two of the city’s other holy houses. Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740-1840
REVIEWS: NEW AND UPCOMING RELEASES ➞ Find more reviews, plus roundups of literary events, online at citypaper.net.
(Yale University Press, 417 pp., $65, Feb. 21) has its origins in a planned, but ultimately abandoned, major exhibition for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 476 pp., $75, March 8) was put together in celebration of that institution’s upcoming bicentennial. Knowing Nature is quite the looker. Its hundreds of drawings and paintings recall a time when art and science were peas and carrots. Each chapter is a surprisingly lively essay: Margaret Pritchard, a curator at Colonial Williamsburg, discusses mapmakers; Kenneth Haltman, an art history professor at University of Oklahoma, takes on Lewis and Clark. Peale and his busybody family get their due in Knowing Nature, but much attention is paid to the other artists and naturalists
COURTESY OF PAFA
whose works (and, often, last names) are well-known in the area. William Bartram’s delicate drawings were meant to convey their subjects with textbook accuracy, but some license was taken: Turtle carapaces resemble provincial domes. Ginseng leaves overlap to demonstrate elegant degrees of translucence. (Curiously, perhaps because he didn’t have a dirigible at his disposal, Bartram’s bird’seye-view maps are loose and whimsical approximations.) A Glorious Enterprise is a bit narrower in focus, in essence a paean to and by the Academy of Natural Sciences — which is fine. After 200 years, the ANS has earned some horn-tooting. The institution had noble intentions from the get-go. Where Peale was known to fill the gaps in his scientific collections with installations of a five-legged cow or a chimp dressed like a person, the “gathering of gentlemen” who founded the ANS in 1812 chose to focus on straight-up natural history. With little overlap, geologically speaking, this book picks up where Knowing Nature leaves off. As science became more distant from art, it seems, some artifacts were more likely to be displayed in glass cases than rendered on canvas. Stuffed lemurs, unpolished gorilla skulls, Joseph Leidy’s jars of tapeworms — all are beautifully photographed, every texture and detail laid bare in ways John Bartram never dreamed.
Fiction
THE ODDS: A LOVE STORY
BY S T E WA R T O N A N
The stakes are clear from the first line of Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel, The Odds: A Love Story:“The final weekend of their marriage, hounded by insolvency, indecision, and, stupidly, half secretly, in the never-distant past
ruled by memory, infidelity, Art and Marion Fowler fled the country.” Here is a marriage on the rocks and a lastditch effort to save it, with a Valentine’s Day weekend at a Niagara Falls casino, and a gambling scheme that’s just boring enough to work. Will it? Art hopes so, Marion’s less sure, and luck has its own role to play. Like O’Nan’s superb Last Night at the Lobster, The Odds is a paean to routine. In this case,
the routine of a crumbling, middleaged marriage: the mounting debts, financial and emotional, and the little kindnesses and cruelties that pepper every day. There’s also the routines of weekend getaways: stuffy bus rides, hotel minibars and, then, the surprising beauty of even the most overplayed tourist attractions. O’Nan isn’t hawking the strangeness of a familiar place and time. Instead, he’s deft enough to