Emeriti Brainstorms - An Art Historian Takes New Delight in Science
Bob Herbert is done with French art history.
After nearly a half century of scholarship on the likes of Seurat, Impressionism, and Renoir, the professor emeritus of the humanities turned to the work of an Amherst-based artist, Orra White Hitchcock, whose nineteenth-century lithographs, woodcuts, and watercolors were known, but whose travel writings were virtually undiscovered—until he stumbled on them.
Herbert has now edited and published Hitchcock’s diaries, which he came across in an archival folder while investigating her artwork at the Amherst College library. Familiar with her lithographs of the Connecticut River Valley that had been previously exhibited, Herbert was surprised and delighted to find her witty journals.
Married to Edward Hitchcock, a prominent geologist and onetime president of Amherst College, Orra describes in a “plainspeak” style what she sees during two trips, one to Europe and the other to Richmond, Virginia. “Unlike other travel diaries, she’s writing to herself. She’s not thinking of others, but merely what she’s seeing,” says Herbert.
In addition to publishing her diaries, Herbert is the co-curator of an exhibition of her art scheduled for October 2010 at Amherst’s Mead Art Museum. Some of Orra’s published illustrations of her husband’s work will be shown, along with several dozen watercolors of plants and large classroom charts and drawings (including prehistoric fossils).
If his move from fine art to science illustration seems jarring, consider this, he says: much of his research was devoted to the work of Seurat, an artist whose exploration of the science of color is evident in his technique, which came to be known as pointillism.
“My interest has been all along … in the relation of art and science,” says Herbert, who is now at work editing Hitchcock’s husband’s travel diaries. Bob Herbert has just begun, again.—M.H.B.
