Exhibition - Yale Center for British Art

Natural History Portfolio was acquired by the Yale Center for British Art in 2015. This summer it will be included in the institution's “A Decade of Gifts and Acquisitions” has been curated by Elisabeth Fairman, chief curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts; Matthew Hargraves, chief curator of Art Collections; Lars Kokkonen, assistant curator of paintings and sculpture; and Sarah Welcome, assistant curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts; under the direction of Scott Wilcox, deputy director for collections. The exhibition runs through Aug. 13.

Other exhibitions are thematic, focusing on childhood and education, war and conflict, and the natural world. The works here have been chosen primarily from recent additions to the Center’s collection of rare books and manuscripts. Among the objects on display are an early map sampler (1806) by a nine-year-old girl; a manuscript by a French naval officer who took part in the Battle of Trafalgar (1805); a Second World War silk escape map; a rare early sciagraph (X-ray) of a lizard from a series of images of British reptiles (1897); and a number of works by contemporary artists, including Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, whose portfolio of cyanotype prints (Natural History, 2014) was inspired by the work of the nineteenth-century naturalist Anna Atkins.