All posts by Gretchen Rings

Considered the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted co-designed many of the most well-known urban parks and landscapes in the United States in partnership with Calvert Vaux (Wikipedia). As Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker, “Was there a patch of grass in nineteenth-century America that he didn’t design? Stanford, Prospect Park, and the Biltmore Estate, in North Carolina; the space around the United States Capitol and preservation plans for Niagara Falls and Yosemite.” In addition to his impressive accomplishments in landscape architecture, including seventeen large urban parks across the United States — most notably Central Park — he was also a journalist, abolitionist, gentleman farmer, and conservationist

During the Victorian era, many gifted women participated in what has been called the “Golden Age of botanical art,” reflecting both a surge in gardening interests across English society, as well advances in book-making technology (Burns, Kramer). Though virtually unknown today, Anne Pratt (1806-1893) was one of the most prolific and popular artists and writers of this time, ultimately producing twenty published works that were loved for their handsome and accurate illustrations, and helping to create interest in flower study in the general public.

In honor of the first Olympics to take place in Brazil, we are highlighting a book contributed by The Field Museum featuring birds of South America, Le Vaillant’s Histoire naturelle d’une partie d’oiseaux nouveaux et rares de l’Amerique et des Indes (1801). Among several titles chosen for digitization from the Field Museum Library’s impressive Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library, housed in the collections of the Mary W. Runnells Rare Book Room, the entry for the volume in Catalogue of the Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library characterizes it as “a work intended to supplement his Hist. Nat. des Oiseaux d’Afrique (q.v.) by describing and figuring birds not properly included in that work.”