Drawn from nature

EDWARD Lear (1812-88) is probably familiar to most readers as the author of nonsense verse, especially The Owl and the Pussycat (1871).

View of the Granite Rocks at Cape Woolamai (c.1872) by Eugene von Guerard

EDWARD Lear (1812-88) is probably familiar to most readers as the author of nonsense verse, especially The Owl and the Pussycat (1871).

But like his contemporary Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), he was a much more complex character - complex, eccentric and engaging - as indeed only the Victorians could be.

Perhaps it is not as paradoxical as it may appear at first sight that a period governed by a strict sense of propriety and duty should produce so many incomparable individuals, whereas one like our own, ostensibly embracing difference, should actually foster a bland conformity tinged with intolerance and even paranoia.

Lear, in any case, was not only a humorist but an artist and, in particular, a remarkable travel painter who wandered about the Mediterranean - from Greece and Italy, where he eventually settled, to Palestine and other territories then part of the Ottoman Empire - and even to India, leaving many fine and evocative watercolours of the places he visited. Some of these are exhibited in one of the international shows I mentioned in the summer round-up a few weeks ago, an exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford commemorating the second centenary of his birth.

The exhibition also includes his scientific work as an ornithological illustrator, which was his original profession, just as that of Dodgson was mathematics, which he taught for most of his life at Christ Church college in Oxford.

As it happens, one of the naturalists for whom Lear worked was John Gould, the author of The Birds of Australia (1840-48); and a magnificent barn owl by Lear - from Gould's earlier Birds of Europe (1832-37) - is one of the first works you encounter in the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery's summer exhibition The Art of Science.

The show, drawn from the holdings of Museum Victoria, will eventually be accompanied by a book, to be published in the coming months; for the time being a concise room brochure is available that reproduces some of the particularly interesting images. The material included is broad in range and extends from early colonial days to the present, with digital prints, macro photographs and even a touchscreen display in which you can select one of scores of butterfly or moth eggs, magnified to look like intricate creations of coloured glass, and see what it will turn into after metamorphosis.

The selection of works begins with the large coloured plates of John James Audubon's The Birds of America (1827-39) juxtaposed with plates from Gould's corresponding study of Australian bird life. They make an impressive opening to the exhibition and are at the same time testimony to the transformation of natural history in the course of the 19th century from an intellectual passion of the Enlightenment to a fashionable luxury in upper-middle-class homes.

More absorbing, for this reason, are the earlier - and indeed some of the later - works that are directly concerned with scientific knowledge and the immediate encounter with nature in the process of empirical research, like those of Ludwig Becker (1808-61), who did many illustrations for the German-Australian naturalist Ferdinand Mueller. Becker's field drawings are particularly evocative, like his Weedy Seadragon (1855), with the annotation "natural size", and a couple of details carefully drawn at "magnitude two and one half".

Also from 1855 is a drawing of the viviparous weedfish - no doubt a pregnant specimen - drawn in watercolour, and then another one drawn in pencil only. Although he had been in Australia for four or five years by this point, the annotations are still in German. From three years later, in 1858, on the other hand, there is a drawing of a gurnard from Hobsons Bay, Melbourne - "caught and coloured from nature, August 17, 1858" - with a half-page of detailed description now drafted in English.

The drawings of a less well-known figure, Arthur Bartholomew, are also noteworthy, including one of a red-bellied black snake (c.1867) and a beautiful sheet of frogs of Victoria (c.1860), in which the touching care with which each little creature is studied and minutely recorded almost makes one forget that undoubtedly they had to be captured and killed to be studied so accurately.

The drawings are first done in pencil to define all the significant morphological characteristics, and then painted in watercolour to preserve this most subtle but vital aspect of their appearance. Little patches of water paint around the edges of the drawings are like a glimpse into the artist's process, for they were made as he tested each shade of brown or green to see whether he had correctly matched each part of the body that lay before him as he worked, and which is now long gone, leaving only the drawing behind.

There are many other works that similarly can tell us much about their time and their making as well as about the depicted creatures, and the exhibition includes a number of important books, from Linnaeus to an early 18th-century volume that disconcertingly - and by that time rather surprisingly - juxtaposes what look like normal birds with a seven-headed hydra and a flying snake, perhaps the ones that were supposed to live in Egypt in antiquity and are mentioned by Herodotus.

Among the more recent works are very fine line drawings of deep-sea crabs done in ink on tracing paper by Kate Noonan. Nearby is a set of remarkable macro photographs with digital montage of the heads of a fly, a beetle and a spider (2005-06) by Ken Walker. Both are motivated, as a text panel rightly points out, by the overriding imperative of truth and accuracy in this sort of work, where it is crucial to identify the defining and determining characteristics of a species, and where in consequence each articulation of a wing, division of an eye or excrescence on an exoskeletal carapace can be critical.

At the same time, seeing the macro photographs and the line drawings side by side reminds one of the power of drawing in this kind of activity, and why indeed drawn diagrams have never been superseded by photographs, in this or any other field. For while the photograph can provide a quantity of information that the drawing cannot hope to rival, it does not discriminate between the important and unimportant elements of that information, as a drawing can. A drawing is an act of selection and judgment, not a copying of the given but a making of meaning.

The Mornington Peninsula Gallery is not entirely devoted to this exhibition but divided between natural history at one end and landscape at the other, with Vision Splendid, a celebration of landscape painting in this part of the Victorian coast just southeast of Port Phillip Bay. Among the finest pictures in this show is a little View of the Granite Rocks at Cape Woolamai (c.1872) by Eugene von Guerard, whose rendition of a sublime subject - waves crashing on a dramatic outcrop of jagged granite forming a small promontory - is, as always, underwritten by the artist's intimate understanding of geological structure and his sense of the duty of the painter, akin to that of the naturalist, to give a true account of natural phenomena.

It is particularly interesting in this regard to compare another painting by von Guerard, his View of Saint Agnes Head (1873), with a larger painting of the same subject by the less well-known Thomas Wright (1874). This picture is both competent and attractive, especially in its treatment of the accidents of light, but Wright's treatment of the geological structure of the promontory that dominates the composition is simply inarticulate compared with von Guerard: it is like the difference between life drawings informed or uninformed by an understanding of anatomy.

The care with which von Guerard studied his landscape motifs in nature is clear from a beautiful double-page drawing for the Cape Woolamai painting in the sketchbook displayed nearby. The artist has taken great care to define the unique structure of the granite outcrop - so much so that one could compare the drawing and the painting with the view today and undoubtedly identify any degradation or rock falls that may have taken place in the past 140 years. While the principal motifs are exactingly analysed, it is not practical or useful to attempt the same level of detail in the small rocks of the foreground, and here we can see the artist has simply noted the larger and more significant ones, leaving the rubble to be improvised.

Other works in the exhibition include a fine little etching by Tom Roberts and two by Jessie Traill, and several small paintings by Clarice Beckett, one of a campfire at San Remo (c.1924). There is also a vivid plein-air study by Arthur Streeton, An Impression from the Deep (1889), in which the tumultuous foreground water crashing on the rocks contrasts with the peaceful distance beyond. Even sketchier is a small but charming picture by Walter Withers from the following decade, of two figures walking along the beach in a headwind.

Most striking among the 20th-century pictures is a modestly sized painting by Rick Amor, Grounded Boat, Western Port Bay (1997). This large ocean-going fishing boat or small cargo ship had apparently been purchased some 30 years earlier by someone who believed he could negotiate what appear to be marshy wetlands, presumably with some navigable channels. At any rate, the unfortunate owner ended up grounding his ship in the shallows and was unable to dislodge it.

By the time Amor encountered this strange and memorable wreck, resonant with metaphorical suggestion and recalling so many tragic ship voyages, it had been immobile for decades; it was still brightly painted and had a ladder resting against the side of the hull, suggesting perhaps that someone lived in it - unless this was a motif added by the artist to animate the subject in our imaginations.

At any rate, it is a fine painting, one that in its strange mixture of dream and reality makes you want to spend time pondering it. Nearby is another, much bigger painting by Amor, The Silent East (2006). Here we see a far larger freighter aground in the tidal shallows of a bay, no doubt an imaginary extrapolation from the real wreck discovered a decade earlier.

This painting too makes a striking impression, with its combination of vast space, scale and the elegiac sunset casting a melancholy tone over the stricken ship and the desolate emptiness. But in all of this there is something a little self-conscious compared with the first version; the later work is indeed striking, but the earlier one is intriguing, as though pregnant with meaning glimpsed but not fully explained.

The Art of Science.
Vision Splendid: Landscapes of Phillip Island and Western Port. Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, both to February 17