spring/summer 2018 - huntington.orgchop suey, usa: how americans discovered chinese food yong chen...

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

SPRING/SUMMER 2018

EXAMINING THE BLUE BOY

A BOOK FULL OF SEAWEED

COUNTING EXTINCTION

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SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON

STEVE HINDLE Interim President and

W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research

SANDRA L. BROOKE Avery Director of the Library

LARRY J. BURIK Vice President of Facilities

JAMES P. FOLSOM Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen

Director of the Botanical Gardens

CATHERINE HESS Interim Director of the Art Collections and

Chief Curator of European Art

COREEN A. RODGERS Anne and Jim Rothenberg Vice President for Financial Affair

RANDY SHULMAN Vice President for Advancement

SUSAN TURNER-LOWE Vice President for Communications and Marketing

MAGAZINE STAFF

EDITOR Kevin Durkin

DESIGNER Lori Ann Achzet

Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually by the Office of ommunications and Marketing. It strives to connect

readers with the rich intellectual life of The Huntington, capturing in news and features the work of researchers,

educators, curators, and others across a range of disciplines.

INQUIRIES AND COMMENTS:Kevin Durkin, Editor, Huntington Frontiers1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108

[email protected]

Unless otherwise acknowledged, photography is provided by The Huntington’s Department of Imaging Services.

© 2018 The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of the contents, in whole or in part, without permission of the

publisher, is prohibited.

1151 Oxford Road | San Marino, California 91108 | huntington.org

FROM THE EDITORTAKING A CLOSER LOOK

At first glance, the world around us can seem an overwhelming cacophony of details. To make sense of what we behold, we often need to slow down, sharpen our focus, and give ourselves a chance to reflect deeply. The reward for such attentiveness can be a new

discovery for a scientist, a new insight for a humanist, or simply a refreshed appreciation of the world we inhabit. This issue of Huntington Frontiers is filled with such thoughtful observations. In our cover story (see pg. 13), Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Usha Lee McFarling shines light on the intersection of art and science at the heart of “Project Blue Boy,” the two-year examination and conservation treatment of one of the most famous paintings in British and American history, The Blue Boy, made around 1770 by the English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788). Her interview of The Huntington’s senior paintings conservator, Christina O’Connell, as she talks shop with renowned ear surgeon John House about a surgical microscope used in the project reveals interesting parallels between their professions. Michele Navakas, a member of the English faculty at Miami University of Ohio and a 2017–18 National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in residence at The Huntington, provides a meditative piece on The Huntington’s rare book Algology (see pg. 8). This 1850 volume contains 293 specimens of seaweed collected in New York Bay by the author, Charles F. Durant, a Jersey City stockbroker. John N. Trager, The Huntington’s curator of desert collections, shares his observations of the remarkable feather cactus, Mammillaria plumosa, both in its native Mexico and as it appears under the microscope of The Huntington’s research botanist, Raquel Folgado Casado (see pg. 6). In his book Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai‘i, Daniel Lewis—Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology—draws from papers in The Huntington’s collections to describe encounters that the field biologist John Sincock had in the 1970s with the Kaua‘i ‘O‘o, a bird species that was teetering on the brink of extinction (see pg. 18). At The Huntington, and in these pages, we invite you to take a closer look at things that will engage your intellect and fill you with wonder.

Kevin Durkin

Kevin Durkin is editor of Huntington Frontiers and managing editor in The Huntington’s Oce of Communications and Marketing.

On the cover: The light of a surgical microscope illuminates the eye of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (ca. 1770). Photograph by Lisa Blackburn.


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FEATURES

A BOOK FULL OF SEAWEED 8 Algology preserves a passionate engagement with the underwater world By Michele Navakas

EXAMINING THE BLUE BOY 13 A paintings conservator and an ear surgeon talk shop By Usha Lee McFarling

DEPARTMENTS SOCIAL SCENE 4 CURATOR’S INSIGHT 6 A Botanical “Feathered” Friend By John N. Trager

LESSONS LEARNED 18 Counting ExtinctionBy Daniel Lewis IN PRINT 22 Recommended Reading FINAL CUT 23 Everything You Need to Know…By Lori Ann Achzet and David Mihaly

Contents SPRING/SUMMER 2018

volume 13, issue 2

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13

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Top: A seaweed specimen in Algology, an 1850 volume by Charles F. Durant that contains 293 specimens of seaweed that he collected in New York Bay. Center: The Huntington’s senior paintings conservator, Chrisitna O’Connell, and renowned ear surgeon John House discuss Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. Photograph by Lisa Blackburn. Bottom: Detail of Kauaʻi ‘O‘o, 1890. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Cullman Library.


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SOCIAL SCENEA PEEK AT WHAT WE’RE UP TO ONLINE

As part of our recent exhibition “The Reformation: From the Word to The World,” visitors were invited to post personal statements to a replica of a church door, mirroring the way Martin Luther shared his “95 Theses” 500 years earlier. The response was overwhelming—visitors posted more than 1,500 cards—and shared them on our social media channels using the hashtag #WordToWorld—over the course of the exhibition. Here are a few of the ideas, beliefs, and bits of advice visitors contributed.


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SOCIAL SCENE

We’re also on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more! Links at huntington.org

Roughly 100 sixth-graders from the Charles W. Eliot Arts Magnet Academy in Altadena and 75 eighth-graders from the Arroyo Seco Museum Science Magnet School in Los Angeles took part in daylong learning experiences inspired by the exhibition “Visual Voyages.”huntingtonblogs.org/2018/01/deep-learning-about-visual-voyages/

Art intern Molly Curtis contemplates how we understand works that seem to purposely leave out key elements of a story. huntingtonblogs.org/2017/11/deliberate-omissions/

In his sonnets, notes research fellow Catherine Bates, Shake-speare compares the business of making babies with the busi-ness of making money.huntingtonblogs.org/2018/04/the-queerness-of-shakespeares-sonnets/

A group of Herb Garden docents gathered in the Botanical Center’s headhouse to work on a textile installation piece dis-played during Fiber Arts Day.huntingtonblogs.org/2018/04/fiber-arts/

ON SOUNDCLOUD AND ITUNES…These lectures are only a tiny fraction of The Huntington’s audio available for free on SoundCloud and iTunes.

Exhibition Talk: Live Free or Die Soyoung Shin and Juliana Wisdom

Civil Wars: A History in IdeasDavid Armitage

Chop Suey, USA: How Americans Discovered Chinese FoodYong Chen

Conference: First Light: The Astronomy Century in California, 1917–2017

The Culture of Consumerism in the Renaissance

Martha Howell

In Search of Blue Boy’s True ColorsKimberly Chrisman-Campbell

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The Introduction of Japanese Plants into North AmericaPeter Del Tredici

3In the center of one flyleaf of the Ellesmere Chaucer, someone put quill to parchment and wrote: “Margery seynt John ys a shrew” (“Margery St. John is a shrew”). huntingtonblogs.org/2017/12/graffiti-in-the-ellesmere-chaucer/

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As The Huntington’s curator of desert collections, I, along with my sta�, care for 2,000 species of succulents, including a vast range of cacti, in the 10-acre

Desert Garden, plus thousands more in 20,000 square feet of greenhouse and other nursery space. Over the years, specimens have come to us from a variety of sources, including other botanical gardens, nurseries, and private collections. In the early days, when Henry E. Huntington’s superin-tendent William Hertrich (1878–1966) presided over the gardens, and up until a few decades ago, it was common for plants to be collected during expeditions to their natural habitats. (We still do this, but it’s become more and more rare because of the international restrictions in place meant to protect plant material in their native habitats.) That’s how we came to grow an example of the feather cactus, Mammillaria plumosa. This plant is on the opposite end of the prickly spectrum from the spiny cactus varieties with which most people are familiar. Its spines are soft and feathery, as its name implies.

As the plant grows, it forms more and more pincushion-like heads. We propagated these plants by separating the heads to root on their own and then shared many specimens with other institutions and private collectors. This is good insurance for us because, if we lose a plant, others can return the favor by sharing one of their propagations to restore the collection. One head we planted about a decade ago has multiplied into dozens, forming a mound-ing cushion about a foot in diameter. It lives in the Desert Conservatory, where we invite visitors to touch it. But, admittedly, as much as we love presenting the plants here at The Huntington, it’s especially rewarding to see them in their natural habitat. So, when the opportunity arises, I’m eager to tear myself away from the greenhouse to do fieldwork. The experience can yield insights into natural variability, associated flora, and ecological relation-ships with habitat, plants, and animals. It can also help inform our cultivation practices so that we can better grow the plants in our care.

A Botanical “Feathered” FriendCACTUS'S SOFT TOUCH PROVIDES KEY TO ITS SURVIVAL

By John N. Trager

curator’s insight

Above: A magnified spine cluster of Mammillaria plumosa, showing the feather-like nature of the spines. Photograph by Raquel Folgado Casado.


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When I set out on a field trip last summer to northern Mexico, I didn’t know what to expect. I was exploring a cli�side in Huasteca Canyon near Monterrey, in the state of Nuevo León, when a companion asked me to identify two species of mammillaria. I scanned the cli� and identified Mammillaria formosa and Mammillaria winterae and, lo and behold, nestled where two cracks in the cli� converged, was our old friend, the feather cactus, Mammillaria plumosa. After returning from Mexico, I was inspired to take a closer look at our Mammillaria plumosa. With the help of The Huntington’s research botanist, Raquel Folgado Casado, we captured some close-ups through a dissecting microscope. Under mag-nification, the spines radiating from each areole look like ostrich feathers.

Peering beneath the spines re-vealed spine clusters that resemble little parasols, held aloft on small conical projections called tubercles. These not only shade the plant from the most intense sunlight but also di�use light, rather like a photographer’s di�using umbrella, shedding light evenly to all sides of the green tubercles—and rendering Mammillaria plumosa one of the most beautiful cacti, in my opinion. It is also a marvel of e�ciency

in how it makes best use of available light. Plants that inhabit cli�s can be alternately exposed to blazing sun or dry shade. During a shady Mexican afternoon, the cli� still radiates the warmth of the day, and the plants still have several hours of photo-synthetic work to be done before darkness falls. I have always appreciated Mammillaria plu-mosa, but seeing it in the wild gave me newfound curiosity and respect for this botanical wonder. Visitors can see—and even touch—this cactus in the Desert Conservatory, which is open every Saturday during public hours.

John N. Trager is The Huntington’s curator of desert collections.

Left: The cliffside habitat of Mammillaria plumosa in Huasteca Canyon, located near Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. Photograph by John N. Trager. Right: Mammillaria plumosa, nestled where two cracks in a cliff onverge in Huasteca Canyon. Photograph by John N. Trager.


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A Book Full of Seaweed ALGOLOGY PRESERVES A PASSIONATE ENGAGEMENT WITH THE UNDERWATER WORLD

By Michele Navakas

The documentary Chasing Coral (2017) brings coral close. Using underwater time-lapse photography, the film chronicles the catastrophic effects of global warming on coral reefs. The goal is to get people to feel for coral, and to me it seems impossible that anyone would not be moved by witnessing the transformation of colorful, thriving coral habitats into dead, abandoned, ghostly white husks. Yet a review of the film in the Telegraph, which largely praises its ingenuity and effec-tiveness, questions whether any effort could conquer “public indifference to the underwater world.” For who could possibly find coral “adorable,” other than specialists, such as the marine biologists, coral photographers, and other self-proclaimed “coral nerds” who feature in the film? For the rest of us, “the truth is that, close-up, these animal-plant hybrids look weird and icky,” hardly a subject worthy of our affection, let alone the kind of passion required for preservation. I had this review in mind recently in the Ahmanson Reading Room when a staffmember handed over a rare book I had requested, a work by one C. F. Durant, pub-lished in New York in 1850, and fancifully titled Algology. The word is stamped in large, gold cursive letters across a red leather bind-ing, and it means, essentially, the collection, preservation, and identification of seaweeds. It was immediately clear to me that this book would not be a book alone: it would be an experience. For C. F. Durant was not indifferent to the underwater world.

Opposite page: A few of the 293 seaweed specimens in the pages of Algology (1850), by Charles F. Durant. Photograph by Kate Lain. This page: Elaborately bound in red leather, Algology is embossed with gold cursive lettering and gold flourishes that visually echo the shapes of the seaweed specimens mounted in the book.


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Charles Ferson Durant (1805–1873) was not a scientist, or any sort of seaweed specialist, but rather a man of wide and varied interests, as I learned by piecing together a variety of scattered sources (there is no comprehensive biography). A Jersey City stockbroker by day, Durant was also a prolific author on many topics. Publication notices for Algology hail Durant as “the first in this country to issue a book on the science of Algology,” but his other work includes a book on animal magnetism, a study of silk production, a guide to hydraulics, and a volume of poetry titled The Aeronaut to the People! (1833). (Apparently, Durant flew hot air balloons on several occasions in New York and Boston during the 1830s, and would toss handfuls of his poems, on the joys of hot air balloon flight, to the crowds below—the aeronaut to the people! He is sometimes hailed as our nation’s first distributor of aerial leaflets.) In his capacity as “algologist,” however, Durant participated in what was actually a somewhat popular Victorian pastime. Victorians loved seaweed, which they a�ectionately called “ocean-flowers.” They would gather it from the seaside, and then dry and mount it in the pages of “seaweed albums,” scrapbooks kept as souvenirs or given as gifts. Yet what sets Durant apart from other seaweed enthusiasts is the sheer volume of specimens that he was determined not only to collect and preserve, but also to share with the public. For Algology is not a personal album, but rather a work issued by a well-known New York publishing firm in a print

run of 15 copies. And each copy contains no less than 300 specimens. The book is literally filled with seaweed. Wonderful and strange, in a variety of greens, reds, browns, and purples, branching in all manner of sinuous forms, seaweed—actual seaweed—graces no less than 60 pages of Algology, about five specimens per page. The Huntington’s copy is unusually well-preserved: it contains 293 of the original 300 specimens Durant had included. Some are thick and textured; others are graceful, thin, and fanning; all are completely captivating. But perhaps the most astonishing fact is that, in order to fulfill his print run, Durant had to have collected, preserved, and mounted no less than 1,500 pieces of seaweed. How—and why—would a Jersey City stockbroker possibly do that? “For two years,” explains Durant in the preface of Algology, “I lived a sort of amphibious life, paddling about the shallows when the tide was out, in quest of specimens.” On some mornings, he would rise before dawn, walk the 10 minutes

Above and right: Michele Navakas—assistant professor of English and affiliate of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio, and a 2017–18 National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in residence at The Huntington—examines the astonishing range of seaweed colors and textures in Algology, well preserved more than a century and a half after author Charles F. Durant prepared the volume. Photographs by Kate Lain.


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from his home to New York Bay, and wade the waters in the early hours, spared from “the business a�airs of the day.” On other days, though, Durant would visit more “distant shores of the Bay,” and spend “several hours,” or even “an entire day,” collecting. “The original design was to acquire at least one of each species indigenous to the harbor,” he explains. In size, the harbor’s seaweeds ranged from “microscopic to gigantic growth,” and they came in all colors, though most commonly “olive, red, and green.”

“The pursuit is easy; a delightful recreation,” Durant assures us. Indeed, it is “particularly and invitingly appropriate for ladies,” who have “delicate fingers” and “keen perceptions.” The di�culty comes in identifying what one has collected: “ascertaining the exact position of each plant in the natural order” is especially vexing with algae because algae “of di�erent genera” sometimes look exactly the same, while others of “the same species will seem entirely dissimilar.” And then there is the work of “preparing and drying.” Some specimens are “most delicate,” and thus require immediate attention. Most are “more hardy and tough,” and thus could wait until evening, when Durant would return home to perform “microscopic examinations” by “the light of the candle or lamp” before mounting the specimens on small cards he would number and a�x to the pages of his masterwork.

All told, Algology took 2,000 hours of labor, including over 1,000 miles of “perambulations on tidal and sea-shore.” Appropriately, Durant dedi-cated the book to Neptune. The dedication page features an engraving of the sea god grasping a triton, below which Durant hails him as “the noble scion of Saturn, whose kingdom is the seas, and whose care is the plants and the creatures that live in and upon the waters.” It closes with gratitude from Neptune’s “grateful and obliged servant, The Author, Jersey City, December 1850.”

Pondering this page, along with the sheer scope and glory of Algology, I realized that my brief foray into Durant’s life gave me a lifetime of things to think about. Yet I still hadn’t solved the mystery of his motivations: what compels a man to turn into an amphibious algologist? Answering this question required me to do what literary scholars are best at doing: examine the words on the page. Or, in this case, the words and the seaweed on the page.

One of the strangest, most wonderfully illumi-nating moments in Algology is when Durant describes his realization that seaweed can move.

Peering closely through the lens of a micro-scope, he writes, “the first discovery of this motion produced a sympathetic shock, that caused me to close the eye, and suddenly withdraw it from the micro-scope; the sensation was akin to that ex-perienced when unexpectedly witnessing the accidental maiming or killing a fellow-creature.” Why did the motion of seaweed generate this response? Because Durant thought the plants’ motions may have been “caused by pain,” and that, having been “several hours out of their element,” they may even “have felt the agonies of death.” The motions suggested to Durant that seaweed was not a mere plant, but rather an animal—one that could feel as humans could. One purpose of the book, then, is to draw attention to the motions of seaweed, and to the resulting taxonomic question of whether seaweed is truly a vegetable after all. The prospect exhilarated Durant: it could upend the system of classification instituted by Linnaeus, the great Enlightenment taxonomist. Linnaeus had long ago identified seaweed as a vegetable, yet Linnaeus resided “at a great distance from the sea,” explains Durant, and thus he never saw seaweed in its “natural element.” For, if he had, he probably would have “[hesitated] before severing the link with which Nature binds both Algae and Corallines to animal life.” The motions of seaweed moved plant and animal closer together along the taxonomic chain, but they also mattered for another reason. When conducting his nightly “microscopic examinations,” Durant sometimes felt that looking closely at algae was like peering at “an unfathomable abyss, too wide, too deep, too vast for perfect exploration by human eye, or intellectual vision.” Seaweed con-fronted him with the limits of human perception itself. It told him how much he did not know—and perhaps could not know—of the natural world. This is the lesson we risk missing if we never look closely at seaweed, and it compelled Durant to wade the shallows of Jersey City for two years, and over a thousand miles: he wanted to bring seaweed close, and share the humbling shock of knowing the natural world’s unfathomable complexity. So, then, what can we learn from these en-counters—Durant’s, with the underwater world; ours, with his book full of seaweed?

Above: Durant’s decorative title page for Algology bears the text’s official title, Algae and Corallines, of the Bay & Harbor of New York. Illustrated with Natural Types. Victorians were fascinated by seaweed and enjoyed collecting it in “seaweed albums.” What makes Durant unique is that he published his seaweed album with a major New York firm, which printed at least 15 copies of the book.


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When you do take the time to look closely at the seaweed in Algology, you know pretty quickly that there are no words to fully describe them in all of their surprising color, manifold shapes and textures, and minute details. And this is exactly the point. As Durant explains, if one is to know seaweed, then “[l]anguage alone is inadequate.” One must also observe it alive in its “native element” and peer closely, and often, at “natural (not painted)” types. Only from the combination of words, living examples, and natural specimens can knowledge of seaweed emerge—along with the stunning realiza-tions about ourselves and the world that we gain from attending to the smallest, most submerged, and apparently unimportant forms of life. First and foremost, then, Algology teaches us that some things just cannot be digitized. Digital databases of early printed works and manuscripts are critical because they dramatically expand scholarly and public access to the words on the pages of books that may otherwise remain hidden away in libraries or other cultural institutions. Yet, in many cases, words alone yield only partial or inaccurate knowledge. Sometimes we require the thing itself. Second, Algology shows how much we need not only archives, but also places that bring together specialists trained in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of rare materials. I regularly rely on the interdisciplinary collaboration that The Huntington fosters, combining my training in literary analysis with the expertise of curatorial sta� in rare books and the history of science. Some kinds of knowledge emerge only from the combination of language and seaweed, paper and binding, curator and literary scholar.

Finally, Algology tells us that “public indi�erence to the underwater world,” though widespread today, is neither natural nor inevitable. There was a time in this country when studying the sub-aqueous was popular, no matter one’s day job—a time when coral, seaweed, and other submerged life forms were not “weird and icky” to all but specialists. Readers of Algology felt deeply for seaweed, and they wanted to reach out and literally feel the specimens. Durant anticipated this, admonishing readers not to do so to protect the specimens. “Don’t touch the plants. Look through a lens,” warns a tiny figure of Neptune that Durant placed among the specimen placards (see image above). Indeed, “[t]he crowning beauty of Algology is…the plants themselves,” raved one 19th-century reviewer of the book. We need a book full of seaweed now more than ever. The U.S. is one of the world’s five most significant emitters of carbon dioxide. If this is partly because we care only for parts of nature that we regularly see, then we need to see more seaweed. We need, in other words, to learn to feel for the underwater world from those who were better at it than we are.

Michele Navakas is assistant professor of English and a�liate of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio, and a 2017–18 National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in residence at The Huntington. Her first book, Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America, was published this year by University of Pennsylvania Press. She is currently at work on her second book, a cultural history of coral in early America.

Above left: In her first book, Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Michele Navakas analyzes the history of Florida’s incorporation alongside the development of new ideas of personhood, possession, and political identity. Reading a vast archive of texts spanning Revolution to Reconstruction, Navakas uncovers an alternative history of American possession not descended from conceptions of American land as enduring, solid, and divisible. Above right: Nestled among the 293 seaweed specimens in Algology is a placard with an engraving of Neptune, who warns readers, “Don’t touch the plants. Look through a lens.” Durant must have pasted this placard in the book to preserve the samples from the hands of eager readers. The placard also identifies The Huntington’s copy of the book as a gift “Presented to the Metropolitan Fair in aid of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. With the respects of the author. Jersey City Feb 24, 1864.”


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Examining The Blue Boy A PAINTINGS CONSERVATOR AND AN EAR SURGEON TALK SHOP

By Usha Lee McFarling

Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (ca. 1770) may well be an icon of Western art and one of the most beloved attractions at The Huntington, but now that it is nearly 250 years old, this epic portrait is in need of some tender loving care. The edges are brittle, and in some places, the paint is starting to lift and flake away. The Blue Boy has had some touch-up work done in the past, but until four years ago, The Huntington did not have a full-time paintings conservator on staff. With Christina O’Connell in that role, The Blue Boy is finally about to get the full makeover he needs.


Dubbed “Project Blue Boy” and funded by a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project, the two-year technical examination and conservation treatment began in the fall of 2017, when the painting underwent preliminary conservation analysis in O’Connell’s lab. An important part of “Project Blue Boy” is that many stages of treatment will be presented from Sept. 2018 to Sept. 2019 in the Thornton Portrait Gallery, where the painting traditionally hangs. Before O’Connell could embark on “Project Blue Boy,” she needed the right tool with which to conduct diagnostics—a powerful microscope. The small, five-decades-old microscope in her lab just wasn’t up to the task. Here’s where serendipity played a role. A conversation between a Huntington sta� member and Board of Overseers member Barbara House sparked a curious connection: Barbara’s husband, John, is a renowned ear surgeon, of the House Ear Clinic in Los Angeles. He uses high-powered microscopes all the time in his delicate work. Could a surgical microscope do the job of art conservation? In follow-up conversations, House and O’Connell set o� to find out, with House ultimately putting in motion the loan of a Haag-Streit surgical microscope that has made the process of The Blue Boy’s restoration not only possible but much easier. What surprised both O’Connell and House—who work in such di�erent areas—was how much they had in common in the work that they do. For Huntington Frontiers, Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Usha Lee McFarling recently sat down with the pair as they talked over the project. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

McFarling: John, how did you get involved in this project?

House: We knew the project needed a microscope, and I thought I could help. I went to a couple of microscope vendors we work with and, as it turned out, they were happy and eager to help and have been incredibly cooperative. Haag-Streit has given us, on a long-term loan, this wonderful microscope.

McFarling: Christina, what kinds of things did you tell Haag-Streit you needed that might not be important to medical users like John?

O’Connell: I jumped right into talking shop with the Haag-Streit reps, and they were fascinated because they hadn’t worked on a project that was art related. We spent a lot of time discussing the light source because I needed one that did not generate heat and let us see the painting’s true

Q&A

Previous page: The Huntington’s senior paintings conservator, Christina O’Connell, examines The Blue Boy, made around 1770 by the English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788). This page: While O’Connell looks on, renowned ear surgeon John House peers through a Haag-Streit surgical microscope at The Blue Boy. Photographs by Lisa Blackburn.


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colors. I need to be able to distinguish between what paint is original and what’s not. When the reps saw our laboratory microscopes, they said, “Oh, we can do so much better.”

McFarling: How important is the new microscope to this project?

O’Connell: Well, when we are diagnosing The Blue Boy, he can’t tell us his medical history or his treatment history. We have to look carefully at both the painting and historical documents to find the information we need. Having a microscopic view of the surface is better for evaluating whether the painting is stable or not because you can really see how the cracks look or if paint is lifting. These are things you might miss without proper magnification.

House: Absolutely. The microscope gives you not only the magnification, but also the illumination focused exactly where you need to look. It makes me think about what our ancestors went through when they were looking at these paintings. They may have used candlelight or sunlight, and they didn’t have the magnification we have. In our field, people were trying to do ear surgery with gas lamps and no magnification, looking through a little tiny instrument into the ear. When the microscope came into play, it dramatically opened many doors with respect to what we could do surgically in the tiny structure of the ear. Back in the 1800s, the things that they were doing were amazing, considering the tools they had.

McFarling: The microscope is large enough to extend over this immense painting. What else about it helps you do your work?

O’Connell: There’s a controller device that I can activate with my foot to move the microscope, adjust magnification and focus, and capture images. Since it’s a foot control, I can do all this while my hands keep working.

House: And she can adjust the working distance. Say she’s really close in and her brush hits the microscope, she can just pull and the microscope will stay in focus as she moves back. With older microscopes, you had no choice on the working distance. She can go way back or be in close and stay in focus.

McFarling: Your work couldn’t be more di�erent—but are there similarities in what you need from a microscope, whether you are viewing a human ear or a Grand Manner portrait?

House: Having 3-D vision is very important. The painting is flat, but I’m sure there are little ridges and things that you really need to view closely, to get the idea of their shape. In my case, we have to have 3-D in order to have depth perception because I put an instrument in the ear, and I don’t want to go too far with my instrument.

O’Connell: Exactly. These are very much com-posite objects, and there is more texture than you would think. When there are areas of paint that are lifted up, having that depth perception is important so that I can see how far it’s lifting and can carefully watch it go back down to plane, which happens during treatment.

McFarling: What else excites you about this microscope’s capabilities, and the project?

O’Connell: We can photograph through the microscope and also videotape. Documentation is a very important part of our work, ethics, and practice, so having this capability to take images is very important. We couldn’t do any of that imaging with our other microscope.

House: And it’s perfect because you can connect the microscope to a large, high-resolution, flat screen as Christina works on it in the public gallery. I was on a trip in Florence with several members of The Huntington a few years ago, and we toured a conservation lab where a woman was restoring a painting on a sca�old using magnifying glasses. We were standing way back and looking—it was amazing to watch her work—but we really couldn’t see what she was doing. So, it’s very exciting to think about doing this conservation with a micro-scope and a screen so the public can see exactly what Christina sees. It will be a tremendous education for anyone interested in the conservation of paint-ings. It’s like when we’re teaching ear surgery. We teach, and the students watch the ear surgery, and what they’re seeing is exactly what I’m seeing.

McFarling: Christina, tell me about some of the things you notice when you look at The Blue Boy through the microscope.

O’Connell: You’re definitely getting a closer view of the tricks that the artist used to represent a 3-D world. You can see the paint, but there are some areas where I can actually see the pigment particles, which means Gainsborough was sometimes using more coarsely ground particles that reflect light di�erently. He understood the physical properties of the materials he was using to create his paintings.


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It’s amazing to see how a little dab of paint is the highlight in The Blue Boy’s eye, whereas when you stand back, it just blends together. After you have worked on a painting, you get to know it so well that you become attached to it. You know the surface and every bit of it.

McFarling: Tell me about some of the work you are going to do to repair The Blue Boy and reveal some of his original vibrancy.

O’Connell: I can see the painting has been treated many times in the past, and we’re still going through all of our data to figure out if we can have a better estimate of how many times or what has actually been done. But there are some areas where Gains-borough painted the background very thinly, and there are areas where people have scrubbed the painting in the past and rubbed o� some of the paint. We call that abrasion.

House: Oh, that hurts.

O’Connell: I know. It hurts me, too. I can see un-even cleanings where people have started to take things o� and stopped. In some ways, I’m glad


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Opposite page, top: Christina O’Connell takes a close look at The Blue Boy through the surgical microscope. Opposite page, bottom: Magnified detail of one of The Blue Boy’s eyes, as it appears on the surgical microscope’s display screen. Above: John House and Christina O'Connell talk shop.Photographs by Lisa Blackburn.

they stopped because, if they were going to cause further abrasion, it’s better they stopped and left it uneven.

McFarling: It’s almost like you have to go in and repair someone else’s surgery.

House: We do that all the time.

McFarling: Can you talk about the color of the painting and the haziness? It almost seems as if The Blue Boy is a bit under the weather, no longer sporting his healthy pallor.

O’Connell: There are many layers of varnish and old inpainting—the painting a conservator does to restore a damaged area—that are covering The Blue Boy, and as those materials age over time, they become cloudy and discolored, and they a�ect how the painting reads. The contrast between light and dark is a little bit imbalanced when you have de-graded layers on a painting. Removing those will reveal Gainsborough’s brushstrokes and colors, and then putting new varnishes on without all of those layers in the way will saturate the colors and create that contrast between light and dark again.

House: You’re going to put the varnish back on?

O’Connell: Varnishes were meant to be put on as a temporary and protective layer that could be removed later. We have a lot more varnishes to choose from now compared to what Gainsborough had in his time. And any inpainting I add or repairs I make will occur on top of the new varnish, so it all can be safely removed later—if later treatments call for that. That’s part of our guidelines of practice and code of ethics. I am not going to permanently alter this painting.

House: You’ll do this in very small areas at a time?

O’Connell: I will roll a tiny cotton swab on a toothpick and work on a tiny area to evaluate it. The work proceeds very slowly and carefully. That’s why I need to understand all the di�erent layers, so I can carefully unpack and move through those layers in a controlled way. If anything’s not working out the way we predict, we can stop.

McFarling: John, I see you shaking your head. What are you thinking?

House: I’m thinking: it’s going to take a long time. That’s a big painting.

O’Connell: One of the mantras in my field is, “There’s no such thing as fast conservation work.”

McFarling: That’s di�erent from surgery, when you have a patient under anesthesia.

House: Yes, you have to move right along.

McFarling: Surgeons obviously need good hands. Is that something the two of you share?

House: Certainly.

O’Connell: Steady hands. Hand skills.

House: In a way, I think your work is more di�cult because you can’t brace your hands very well. You’re almost freehanding. When we’re operating, we’re basically bracing our hands—if the patient were to move, we want to make sure we move with her.

McFarling: John, how was it seeing The Blue Boy through the microscope? Did that increase your appreciation?

House: This whole project has increased my appreciation. Seeing it through the microscope is like looking at a di�erent world, really. It was a thrill.

Usha Lee McFarling is a Pulitzer Prize–winning freelance writer based in South Pasadena, Calif.


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Counting ExtinctionTHE LAST OBSERVATIONS OF A SMALL HAWAIIAN BIRD

By Daniel Lewis

lessons learned

In Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai‘i (Yale University Press, 2018), Daniel Lewis, Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington, takes readers on a 1,000-year journey as he explores the Hawaiian Islands’ beautiful birds and a variety of topics, including extinction, survival, conservationists and their work, and, most significantly, the concept of belong-ing. Lewis, an award-winning historian and globe-traveling amateur birder, builds his lively text around the stories of four species—the Stumbling Moa-Nalo, the Japanese White-Eye, the Palila, and the Kaua‘i ‘O‘o. Lewis o�ers innovative ways to think about what it means to be native and proposes new definitions that apply to people as well as to birds. Being native, he argues, is a relative state influenced by factors including the passage of time, charisma, scarcity, utility to others, short-term evolutionary processes, and changing relationships with other organisms. His book also describes how bird conservation started in Hawai‘i and the naturalists and environmentalists who did extraordinary work. In the following excerpt, Lewis draws from papers in The Huntington’s collections to describe encounters that the field biologist John Sincock had in the 1970s with Kaua‘i ‘O‘o, a bird species teetering on the brink

of extinction.

This page: Pencil sketch of a Kaua‘i ‘O‘o by H. Douglas Pratt. Opposite page, top: Field biologist John Sincock in the forest with a tape recorder, from The Huntington’s Scott Collection. Opposite page, bottom: A 1971 memorandum by John Sincock in which he describes his encounter with a pair of Kaua‘i ‘O‘os and his discovery of a nest with young birds in it.

TThe Kaua‘i ‘Ō‘ō, Moho braccatus, seemed to have gone extinct during the 20th century, and more than once. But its survival, and the details of its life history, were not documented until field biologist John Sincock came along. He had been working for the

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for four years on Kaua‘i before spotting

the ‘Ō‘ō. It was a Wednesday—the 26th of May, 1971, around 9:50 in the

morning in the Alaka‘i Swamp. Sincock was out doing forest bird counts. Suddenly, he

heard a hair-raising sound: the call of an ‘ō‘ō. There, within 15 feet of him, were a pair of the birds, flitting around in

the lapalapa and ‘ōhi‘a trees. They had last been heard and recorded in 1968 by Ian Atkinson, a University of Hawaii grad student, who recorded one at the Koaie

cabin area on a wet and windy day, but the bird was not seen, and had not actually been sighted since September 1963,

and despite a few unconfirmed reports in recent years, was thought to be extinct. Sincock watched them for a half-hour with his binoculars. Beyond his field report to his boss at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland 12 days later, and an article in the Kaua‘i newspaper The Garden Island in early June, no contemporary record exists of this en-counter. For the first time, Sincock had left his camera behind; the light meter had been low on battery power. He returned to the site late in the


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afternoon, where he saw them again, feeding on ‘ōhi‘a blossoms, foraging briefly in a Broussaisia umbel, and frequently scratching and grooming themselves. The birds were relatively small—about eight or nine inches long—the smallest of the family of the five birds (at least those known from the his-torical record) to which it belonged. Its diminutive nature was reflected in its Hawaiian name: ‘Ō‘ō ā‘ā, or “dwarf ‘Ō‘ō.” The smallest of five allied species that had lived on other islands were all long extinct.

Returning the next day in heavy rain, he set up mist nets in an attempt to capture the birds, probably to take measurements and band them. The birds watched him with interest but had the sense not to fly into the nets, and frequently sounded their melodious call.

Sincock made his next trip with his wife Renate on May 31, five days later—now loaded heavily with still cameras and 8mm movie cameras, and again spotted the birds, this time in a heavy downpour. Renate took many still photos—in the process becoming, as the Kaua‘i news-paper noted a week later, “probably the first woman in history to photograph an ‘ō‘ō.” These were the first photos ever taken of the bird. She also captured about five minutes of what Sincock later described in a memo to his boss as “fairly good” film, and a couple of “fair” 35mm color slides. In subsequent weeks and


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months, Sincock returned to the area regularly, flown by his friend and helicopter pilot Jack Harter each time. During one visit, he climbed up as close as he could get to the nest for photographs—about 50 feet o� the ground, in the large ‘ōhi‘a tree where the birds were nesting. “I touched the nest and felt young birds, picked one up and was able to determine that one more was in the nest,” he wrote.

Perhaps knowing every observation was critical for the species’ future survival, and that the pair might well be the only ones left on the planet, he recorded every detail of their feeding, flight, and call activities, including the size of their nesting cavity, descriptions of the birds’ feathers and bills, and other details, including the plumage of the juveniles. He also found and took an apparently abandoned ‘Ō‘ō nest and sent it to his bosses at Patuxent. He wasted no time in contacting local and national media, including National Geographic.

The first time he actually heard the bird, though, occurred before he saw it, less than a year after his arrival in the islands—probably on the afternoon of May 5, 1968, as recorded in his memo to his boss in Maryland. “Heard


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a loud call, frequently repeated ‘took’ ‘took’ in the slopes leading to Koaie Valley which I believe was an OO—at least that is the way Munro describes the call of the OO and the call I heard could be described in no other way. Most often the call was a single, loud clear ‘took.’” He thought he probably heard the bird again the next month as well. So, he would have remained attuned to the possibility of the bird’s existence, and by process of elimination alone he very likely correctly identified the call in 1968, being very familiar with recordings of Hawaiian bird songs and calls by then, as well as having experience gleaned from many hours in the field.

The birds appeared frequently during the early and mid-1970s, mostly in the Alaka‘i, and he took extensive photographs of them. Sincock, fellow Federal biologist Mike Scott, and Fred Zeillemaker, the manager of Kaua‘i’s National Wildlife Refuges, made extensive audio recordings throughout the summer of 1975, and at least once in the summer of 1976. Not only had a handful of the birds survived, but based on courtship activities, appeared to be attempting to breed. “We had fantastic looks at several ‘Ō‘ō including a pair heavily engaged in courtship activities,” Mike Scott recounted to me.

Several firsts took place in the next several years, in-cluding very important extensive documentation of the bird’s life history. “We were fortunate to be the first ever to see a young oo bird just out of the nest and photographed the adult feeding it,” Sincock wrote in 1973. Some of his details of the bird’s habits are potentially of great value, especially if the bird does, improbably, somehow survive today. The birds spent much of their time feeding throughout the valley, he wrote to Erickson in 1974. “Frequently they land on the upper dead branches of Ohia trees, sit side by side, and give their melodious call. Calling starts at just about 6 AM and ends at about 7 PM; often calling slacks o� from 11 to 3. They are far more active during the brief periods of 5 to 10 minutes of sunshine, and during the frequent periods of cloud cover and rain they are quiet and di�cult to locate. Their beep-beep call, heard in previous years was not heard during this trip and must only be used during their active nesting.”

The bird was down to a very small number of surviving examples by the mid-1970s. Sincock noted in the summer of 1975, “I fear that the population of oo may be even lower than my guess of possibly two dozen. This one location of 2 or maybe 3 oo is all that I can find.” Sincock would see the birds many times in subsequent years, but never more than two at a time; perhaps they were the same pair. The bird was last seen in 1985 and last heard in 1987. Hurricane Iniki, Hawai‘i’s most damaging hurricane on record, devastated the entire island of Kaua‘i in 1992 and would most likely have decimated any surviving birds. After many thousands of years, the bird was gone.

Daniel Lewis is Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington and research associate professor at Claremont Graduate University.

Opposite page, top: Kaua‘i ‘O‘o, 1890. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Cullman Library. Opposite page, bottom: John Sincock, left, and Mike Scott in the back of a pickup truck, 1978. Photograph courtesy of James Jacobi. This page, top: Daniel Lewis, Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington. Photograph by Dana Barsuhn. Bottom: Cover of Belonging on an Island: Birds, Extinction, and Evolution in Hawai‘i (Yale University Press, 2018).


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From the voyages of Christopher Columbus to those of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, the depiction of the natural world played a central role in shaping how people on both sides of the Atlantic understood and imaged the region we now know as Latin America. In the catalog for The Huntington’s exhibition Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (Yale University Press, 2017), Daniela Bleichmar, associate professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California, shows that these images were not only works of art, but also instruments for the production of knowledge, with scientific, social, and political repercussions.

With an aging, childless monarch, lingering divisions in the aftermath of the Reformation, and the threat of foreign enemies, Shakespeare’s England was fraught with unparalleled anxiety and complicated problems. In How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage (Yale University Press, 2017), Peter Lake—university distinguished professor of history and Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History at Vanderbilt University—reveals the extent to which Shakespeare’s plays speak to the depth and sophistication of Elizabethan political culture and the Elizabethan imagination.

In 1654, England’s Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell conceived a plan of breathtaking ambition: the conquest of Spain’s vast American empire. As the first phase of his Western Design, a large expedition sailed to the West Indies, under secret orders to take Spanish colonies. In The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017), Carla Gardina Pestana, professor of history and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America and the World at UCLA, presents entrenched imperial fantasies confronting Caribbean realities.

The draining of the Fens in eastern England was one of the largest engineering projects in 17th-century Europe. Eric H. Ash, professor of history at Wayne State University, chronicles how a series of Dutch and English “projectors” (promoters of large-scale technological projects), working over several decades and with the full support of the Crown, transformed hundreds of thousands of acres of putatively barren wetlands into dry, arable farmland in The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Ash concludes that the transformation of the Fens had unintended ecological consequences.

Water and Los Angeles: A Tale of Three Rivers, 1900–1941 (University of California Press, 2016) chronicles how Los Angeles rose to significance in the first half of the 20th century by way of its complex relationship to three rivers: the Los Angeles, the Owens, and the Colorado. Authors William Deverell, professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and Tom Sitton, curator emeritus of history from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, detail the challenges and opportunities the three rivers presented to those who would come to make Los Angeles a global power.

In The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (Oxford University Press, 2017), S. Deborah Kang, associate professor of history at California State University, San Marcos, o£ers one of the first comprehensive histories of the Immigration and Naturalization Service on the US-Mexico border from 1917 to 1954. Kang argues that INS o¥cials in the Southwest worked to create immigration laws as well as enforce them and shows how immigration o¥cials, small business owners, local churches and schools, and ethnic organizations created ad hoc policies to keep the border open to unwanted immigrants.

A SAMPLING OF BOOKS BASED ON RESEARCH IN THE COLLECTIONS

In Print


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Everything You Need to Know…YOU LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN, RIGHT? LET’S TEST THAT.

By Lori Ann Achzet and David Mihaly

final cu

Believe it or not, this modern-looking bookmark (see right) is the result of a paper-folding course taught in kindergarten around 1900. It was likely made by Miss Elsie May Doescher of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who proudly displayed it in a “mounting book” filled with her other classroom artwork: elaborate paper weavings, intricate sewing and pin-pricking designs, and examples of precise paper folding. The skills learned from such courses were based on the goals and philosophy of German educator Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852), creator of the revolutionary educational program called kindergarten. Starting in the 1830s, Fröbel introduced a system of teaching art, design, mathematics, and natural history to young children, using these kinds of creative visual materials.

Now, let’s see how sharp your kindergarten skills are! Can you make a similar awesome-looking bookmark using the two patterns below that are based on designs found at The Huntington?

Instructions:1. Cut out the paper strips. Glue parts A to A, B to B and C to C. This will become the piece you will

weave and fold around your bookmark. 2. Here’s the hard part. Fold the red dotted lines into “mountain folds” and the blue dotted lines into

“valley folds.” You are creating the points and weaves in the example on the right. Use the edges of the strip to help you line up your folds. The edges should touch.

3. Now it’s time to weave the bookmark piece into your folded strip. Place the top edges of the bookmark over the folded strip. Wrap the strip around the bookmark, twisting the paper around as needed.

4. Snap a photo of your finished masterpiece and share it with us on Instagram, Twitter, or Tumblr by tagging us!

Lori Ann Achzet is the senior graphic designer in The Huntington’s Oce of Communications and Marketing. David Mihaly is the Jay T. Last Curator of Graphic Arts and Social History at The Huntington.

Glue

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Glue

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