Upon encountering Spencer Finch’s works or meeting him in person, we wonder what kind of man this is—artist, visual poet, engineer, handyman, magician, or some physicist from a bygone era? He seems subtly out of step with his time, eliciting the same fascination as the “demi-savants” (half-scientists) of the nineteenth century. Real or fictional, these individuals possessed an augur’s intuition and relentlessly pursued their goals—for most, this meant an attempt to elucidate the mysteries of nature or meet the growing aspiration toward “enhanced vision.” They were inventors, aeronauts, astronomers, deep-sea divers, mountaineers, chronophotographers, and experts in synesthesia. Writers and avant-gardists, from Jules Verne to J.-K. Huysmans to Marcel Duchamp, not to mention Raymond Roussel, have found splendid pabulum in such figures. An endearing poetry emerged from their unsteady mix of ramshackle experimentalism and scientific rigor, and from the beauty of their contraptions and presentations. One can easily imagine Finch living out an apocryphal life among such individuals. He would probably have been delighted by the presentation, during the 1886 Exhibition of Urban Hygiene in Paris, of a large aquarium machine before a window where the waters of French rivers were made to flow side by side in vertical cross section so that their coloration and “optical purity” could be assessed.
In this imaginary life, Finch would surely have come across Étienne-Léopold Trouvelot, a strange individual who is famous, alas, for having introduced Lymantria (Porthetria) dispar, the gypsy moth, to North America, thereby indirectly causing the destruction of entire forests. Trouvelot, an amateur entomologist, had brought the moth eggs from Europe to crossbreed them with his silk moths, and some caterpillars are said to have escaped when wind overturned his netted enclosure. Following this unhappy incident, Trouvelot may have wondered what else he could study without harming the planet. He was taken with a passion for astronomy—the observation of distant celestial phenomena with which he could never interact. Having practiced drawing since his youth, he made his living as an artist-scientist and insisted on the authenticity of his manual representations: drawings, paintings, pastels, lithographs, and chromolithographs. These seemed to him much more reliable than the embryonic astrophotography of the time. In his work, as in Finch’s, hand and eye trump the mechanico-technical. Trouvelot was invited to use the new telescopes at Harvard and Meudon, and noted his observations in drawings. His finest work was printed and exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, and he was acknowledged as an important astronomer.
There are a number of surprises here. One aspect of this barely fictionalized account of the incompetent entomologist refashioning himself as an astronomical draftsman is the contrast between the high-tech instruments he was allowed to use and the very traditional means by which he recorded his observations. Another is the way in which his subjective record in a notoriously fragile medium became, through reproduction and diffusion, a commonplace of astronomy manuals. There were other, equally singular, exponents of the primacy of artistic observation over the scientific instrument. One such was André des Gachons, who between 1913 and 1951 made tens of thousands of watercolors of the sky, including more than 9,500 as a volunteer observer for the French Central Bureau of Meteorology. He worked at the rate of three atmospheric drawings a day, observing the sky in different directions from a fixed point. In another life, Finch might have been Gachons. He undoubtedly belongs to this family of artisan-observers; he is a torch carrier for the infinite pleasure provided by the kind of delicate, poetic observation that, in our ultra-technological era, remains as sensitive to luminous and colored effects as to the veering course of a butterfly or a leaf falling from a tree.
Upon encountering Spencer Finch’s works or meeting him in person, we wonder what kind of man this is—artist, visual poet, engineer, handyman, magician, or some physicist from a bygone era? He seems subtly out of step with his time, eliciting the same fascination as the “demi-savants” (half-scientists) of the nineteenth century. Real or fictional, these individuals possessed an augur’s intuition and relentlessly pursued their goals—for most, this meant an attempt to elucidate the mysteries of nature or meet the growing aspiration toward “enhanced vision.” They were inventors, aeronauts, astronomers, deep-sea divers, mountaineers, chronophotographers, and experts in synesthesia. Writers and avant-gardists, from Jules Verne to J.-K. Huysmans to Marcel Duchamp, not to mention Raymond Roussel, have found splendid pabulum in such figures. An endearing poetry emerged from their unsteady mix of ramshackle experimentalism and scientific rigor, and from the beauty of their contraptions and presentations. One can easily imagine Finch living out an apocryphal life among such individuals. He would probably have been delighted by the presentation, during the 1886 Exhibition of Urban Hygiene in Paris, of a large aquarium machine before a window where the waters of French rivers were made to flow side by side in vertical cross section so that their coloration and “optical purity” could be assessed.
In this imaginary life, Finch would surely have come across Étienne-Léopold Trouvelot, a strange individual who is famous, alas, for having introduced Lymantria (Porthetria) dispar, the gypsy moth, to North America, thereby indirectly causing the destruction of entire forests. Trouvelot, an amateur entomologist, had brought the moth eggs from Europe to crossbreed them with his silk moths, and some caterpillars are said to have escaped when wind overturned his netted enclosure. Following this unhappy incident, Trouvelot may have wondered what else he could study without harming the planet. He was taken with a passion for astronomy—the observation of distant celestial phenomena with which he could never interact. Having practiced drawing since his youth, he made his living as an artist-scientist and insisted on the authenticity of his manual representations: drawings, paintings, pastels, lithographs, and chromolithographs. These seemed to him much more reliable than the embryonic astrophotography of the time. In his work, as in Finch’s, hand and eye trump the mechanico-technical. Trouvelot was invited to use the new telescopes at Harvard and Meudon, and noted his observations in drawings. His finest work was printed and exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, and he was acknowledged as an important astronomer.
There are a number of surprises here. One aspect of this barely fictionalized account of the incompetent entomologist refashioning himself as an astronomical draftsman is the contrast between the high-tech instruments he was allowed to use and the very traditional means by which he recorded his observations. Another is the way in which his subjective record in a notoriously fragile medium became, through reproduction and diffusion, a commonplace of astronomy manuals. There were other, equally singular, exponents of the primacy of artistic observation over the scientific instrument. One such was André des Gachons, who between 1913 and 1951 made tens of thousands of watercolors of the sky, including more than 9,500 as a volunteer observer for the French Central Bureau of Meteorology. He worked at the rate of three atmospheric drawings a day, observing the sky in different directions from a fixed point. In another life, Finch might have been Gachons. He undoubtedly belongs to this family of artisan-observers; he is a torch carrier for the infinite pleasure provided by the kind of delicate, poetic observation that, in our ultra-technological era, remains as sensitive to luminous and colored effects as to the veering course of a butterfly or a leaf falling from a tree.
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