Snark hunting with Charles Darwin

Alfred Parsons' depiction of Charles Darwin's study in Downe. The wood cutter was J. Tynan. I assume that Alfred Parsons quoted shapes from Henry Holiday's illustration (cut by Joseph Swain) to The Bakers Tale in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark in a similar manner as Henry Holiday used shapes in the works of earlier artists perhaps in order to "point" to these works. The match of each single shape could be quite incidental, but the the spacial relation of most shapes to each other also matches well. That is less likely to be just incidental. (Alfred Parsons' depiction of Charles Darwin's new study is used here with permission by Dr. John van Wyhe, darwin-online.org.uk/. Henry Holiday's illustration has been scanned from a book published in 1911.) This is one of the images which I posted on Flickr a few years ago. It is an earlier version of the image below:

In Henry Holiday's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark I found that Holiday constructed his illustrations as pictorial puzzles by quoting elements from paintings and illustrations of earlier artists (three images on the right side of the comparison image shown above). Holiday assimilated these elements into his Snark illustrations. But I also found that Alfred Parsons may have quoted elements from one of Holiday's illustrations. For more, click on the images in the comment below.

Background: Rotated detail from an illustration by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark Foreground: From Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent_of_Man,_and_Selection_in_Relation_to_Sex - commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Descent_of_Man_%28A._L._Burt_edition%29 The Banker is one of the members of the Snark hunting party. Henry Holiday can draw ears. If the Banker's ear looks strange it is meant to look strange.

(under work) Henry Holiday can draw ears. So, if an ear does not look like an well depicted ear, there may be a reason.

I posted this as a 4758 x 3102 image earlier, but this one is much bigger: 8000x5200. It is an enlargement of the vectorized version of the earlier image. This ship played an important role in the history of science . Its probably most well known passanger was Charles Darwin. However, the Bellman carrying the Banker from Lewis Carroll's and Henry Holiday's "Hunting of the Snark" sneaked into the image. The print is based on a drawing by Conrad Martens , etching published in: Francis Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin , p. 160, 1888. Conrad Martens' drawing has been engraved by Thomas Landseer and published in the year 1838 by H. Colburn in The Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of HMS Adventure and Beagle . Date: 1834-04-16 Location: Tierra del Fuego, Santa Cruz river, 50.1125°S and 68.3917°W maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=5... That is the position calculated by Captain Robert FitzRoy (who had no GPS). The error was small. The drawing shows that the site must have been a river bank (50.13°S, 68.39°W?) near the calculated position. See also: darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F10.2&vi... thebeagleproject.blogspot.com/2009/04/keel-overhauled-175... beagleproject.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/two-feet-from-sink... commons.wikimedia.org: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TheBeagleLaidAshore.png

To me, the Bellman 's arm (upper left corner in the right image) always looked strangely rounded. But obviously there are arms like that. It took me a long time (until today) to get the idea that also these two images could be related although I know Duchenne's photo (shown here in mirror view) since a couple of years. www.evolutionnews.org/2012/05/creepy_ghoulish059671.html "Creepy," "ghoulish," "not the best science" -- these are a few indisputable descriptions applied (by Wired magazine ) to an experiment Charles Darwin conducted in 1868. He was getting ready to write his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and set out to sample reactions from all of 24 human subjects as they responded to and characterized a series of creepy, ghoulish photographs by French physiologist Benjamin Duchenne. Charles Darwin didn't conduct these weird experiments. Duchenne did. On the right side you see a detail from Henry Holiday's illustration to the chapter The Banker's Fate in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (1876). The only known letter exchange between C. L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and Charles Darwin was about photos of facial expressions, which Dodgson offered to Darwin (who kindly rejected the offer).

Gabriel Cornelius von Max: The Vivisector (1883) Neue Pinakothek, Munich See also: www.academia.edu/9962213/Lace-Making_An_Infringement_of_Right

(Vectorized image from a 19th century book) Thanks to John Tufail (one of the few more curageous Snark hunters) for discovering the similarity to Henry Holiday's Boojum.