01_chapter history-8-21_final_Layout 1 22.12.17 17:28 Seite 16
BOX 3
Gerrit Schouten, home-grown artistic genius
Gerrit Schouten was a multi-talented professional artist: skilled in taxidermy, drawing and the making of dioramas (Medendorp 1999, 2008). He was a mixed-race Surinamer, and is assumed to have been largely self-taught. He likely absorbed the skills of people like Louise van Panhuys, who drew and painted plants and landscapes (Görner & Dobat 1991), and John Henri Lance, an amateur naturalist and draughtsman. Schouten sold his beautiful watercolors of plants and animals (Figure 5) to Lance and to the judge Adriaan François Lammens. These watercolors rival those of Maria Sibylla Merian.
Figure 5. Watercolor of the lizard Iguana iguana, with line drawing added to show details of the plates and scales on the head, by Gerrit Schouten, 1800-1839 (source: Artis Bibliotheek, Bijzondere Collecties van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, IZAA100171).
Schouten’s drawings are currently in the Surinaams Museum in Paramaribo, in the Artis Library in Amsterdam (recently integrated in the ‘Bijzondere Collecties’ of the University of Amsterdam), in the Naturalis Museum in Leiden, in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society in London, and in the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco. The Lindley Library has the largest known collection of Schouten’s watercolors, mixed with those of Lance in two large bound volumes. Many of Lance’s and Schouten’s drawings are near-identical in subject and composition, but not in quality: Schouten’s drawings were executed with superior artistic skill. They were intended for use by naturalists, as is obvious from the fact that no backgrounds were drawn, and that the subjects are positioned to show all essential anatomical features to identify the species depicted. Schouten’s most amazing artistic product can be seen in the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden: a box filled with Surinamese butterflies. They look like regular pinned butterflies, but they are entirely artificial. The likeness to real butterflies is uncanny. This appears to be the only surviving box of three that were made by Schouten (Clazien Medendorp, personal communication) (see ‘vlinderkast’ video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgqVia55CVg).
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Natural History and Ecology Suriname | General Introduction / History