Moby Dick Pics
1.
“Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India.”
NOT A WHALE — Melville misinterpretation, but apparently lots of people misinterpreting this at the time.
2. “It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit better.
3. As for the book-binder’s whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor — as stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both old and new — that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases.
4. In old Harris’s collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular flukes.
5. Look at that popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged “whale” and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys.
6. But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale.
“And what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.”
“19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham appears as if frozen in time, his wax head, walking stick and period clothing lending the display an air of authenticity. But the most curious aspect of the model is what lies beneath the suit and stuffing: namely, the Englishman’s actual skeleton. When Bentham died in 1832, he left behind a will with a highly unusual request regarding his remains. As the founder of modern utilitarianism, the philosopher believed it was ethical to do the most good for the most people. He donated his body to science, but requested that once researchers had dissected his remains, they mummify his head and preserve his body, dressed in his own clothes and padded out with hay, for display. In this way, he would become an image of himself: an auto-icon.”
“It’s very hard to describe it to people because there aren’t any other auto-icons,” UCL science curator Hannah Cornish tells Atlas Obscura’s Isaac Shultz. “[Bentham] thought it’d catch on.”
The philosopher spent much of his life preparing for his death. In 1822 — ten years before his actual passing — he commissioned a silhouette for use in 26 memorial rings left to bereaved friends and family members. The rings were fairly standard for the Victorian era, but Bentham’s decision to donate his body was more of “a social taboo,” said UCL curator Subhadra Das in a 2018 statement.
8. All Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and life-like in its general effect.
9. But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale.
10. In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself “H. Durand.”