Although Charles Darwin always regrettednot being able to draw well, he developed a taste for paintings and engravings whilehe was still an undergraduate and ex-pressed strong preferences about pictures of himself1. His first oil portrait, a 64thbirthday present, was not a success: pre-occupied with finishing his problematicInsectivorous Plants, Darwin found thesittings to Walter Ouless unbearably ex-hausting and grumbled that he looked ‘avery venerable, acute, melancholy olddog’2. Six years later, however, when hewas painted for the last time, Darwin was ina more tranquil frame of mind (Figure 1).Commissioned by the Linnaean Society in1881, John Collier was, Darwin reported,‘the most considerate, kind and pleasantpainter a sitter could desire’3.

For this commemorative portrait, judgedby many to be his best likeness, Darwin has abandoned the cosy shawl he wore at Down House and appears ready for hisdaily walk; his customary cloak is drapedround his shoulders and he clutches the soft black hat that he adopted in later years to keep out the winter cold. His sonFrancis felt that Collier had exaggeratedDarwin’s habitually painful expression, butmany viewers see the weary face of akindly, disillusioned man. The sombre tonescontrast with and emphasise the lumi-nescent quality of his head, which imparts a saintly aura. The intense eyes and domedforehead testify to Darwin’s intellectualpowers, while the meticulously paintedwhite beard gives him the authority of a Moses figure empowered to communi-cate God’s laws of nature. Collier subse-quently portrayed Thomas Huxley – hisown father-in-law – proudly leaning on apile of leather-bound tomes, holding up ahuman skull. But Darwin, although seem-ing more diffident, needed no such props to advertise his expertise. During the pre-vious 30 years, the widespread distributionof engravings and photographs had en-sured that Darwin’s features were familiarto many people who had never met him.Even the beard, which initially served todisguise his identity, had become a dis-tinctive hallmark. Despite his humbleposture, Darwin is presenting himself asBritish science’s elderly statesman and mostdistinguished sage.

A late convert to the craze for photo-graphic visiting cards, Darwin recognisedthe power of this new medium for creatingand disseminating a favourable publicimage. Like Renaissance aristocrats andEnlightenment philosophers, Victorianscientists participated in patronage net-works by exchanging photographs. Darwinparticularly appreciated a birthday tribute of two large albums from Europe. Se-cluded at Down House, he could, never-theless, feel that he belonged to an inter-national community: ‘whenever I wantcheering’, he enthused, ‘I will look at theportraits of my distinguished co-workers inthe field of science, and remember theirgenerous sympathy’4.

As techniques improved, it became com-mercially viable to mass-produce photo-graphs. Professional photographers strove tomake their subjects seem natural, yet followedthe conventions of traditional portraiture.Few copies survive of Darwin’s first studiophotograph, which he thought made himlook ‘atrociously wicked’, but he did ap-prove of Henry Maull’s second attempt(Figure 2). Darwin has evidently taken greatcare with his clothes, as he is fashionablydressed in ‘Great Exhibition’ check trousers,with a gratingly coordinated waistcoat andtie. He bought several versions of this photo-graph to send out to family and friends and,after the success of The Origin of Species, itwas sold commercially. For magazine

0160-9327/99/$ – see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0160-9327(00)01323-5 Endeavour Vol. 24(4) 2000 143

Pictures of Charles Darwin

Figure 1 Charles Darwin, John Collier, 1881. Reproduced, with permission, from The NationalPortrait Gallery.

reproduction, the photograph was – like anoil portrait – copied as an engraving andlater chosen by Francis Darwin as a frontis-piece for his father’s memoirs5.

But over the years Darwin’s photographsmade him appear frail and unconfident andhe became more selective about accepting

invitations to pose. This gradual withdrawalcan only have been hastened by the numerouscaricatures that circulated, many of whichexploited his heavy eyebrows to give him asimian appearance and showed him sportinga prehensile tail far longer than his philo-sophical beard (Figure 3). Darwin appearedin shockingly humiliating situations – as amonkey perched in a tree reading his ownbook or squatting on a rock – supplementedby sarcastic explanatory diatribes againsthis ‘untenable and repulsive theory’6.

By airing controversial issues, Victorianvisual and verbal satires stimulated non-academic readers to engage in topical sci-entific debates. Like many others, the 1872caricature reproduced as Figure 3 assumed asophisticated level of viewer awareness, eventhough it was published in Fun, a weeklymagazine designed for a less educatedaudience than Punch. It refers to Darwin’srecent Expression of the Emotions, whichprompted particularly savage invectivebecause, like the previous year’s Descent ofMan, it included human beings in his evo-lutionary theories8. Darwin’s son William,sneered one cynic, could ‘run on all fours,trot or gallop, dig roots with an artificialsnout and climb trees like a coon’9.

To appreciate the caption, readers needed toknow that marine ascidians (familiar to enthu-siastic Victorian seaside collectors as sea-squirts) are sessile creatures, descended,according to Darwin himself, from virileswimming organisms, thus contradicting no-tions of evolution as progress. With her exag-gerated stance and costume, the womanresembles one of these degenerate organisms.Turning away, she avoids the stare of ‘ourmonkey’, thus illustrating the characteristicbehaviour Darwin attributed to blushingwomen. His writer’s quill tucked behind hisear, the simian Darwin holds his left hand upin a warning gesture that might also be a sinis-ter version of benediction ironically empha-sising the sacrilegious nature of his ideas. In acrucial and controversial chapter in his dis-cussion of human emotions, Darwin insistedthat even blushing could be explained physi-cally. Here he takes the woman’s pulse todemonstrate that shame, guilt and embar-rassment affect capillary circulation10.

For his research into people’s emotions,Darwin had hoped to benefit by studyingfamous sculptures and engravings, butfound that artists were primarily con-cerned to depict beauty11. Instead, hecommissioned special photographs anddrawings for his book in order to illustratehow inner feelings affect facial expressions.With such a sensitive attitude, it is hardlysurprising that he should monitor his ownimages so closely.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Janet Browne and MartinRudwick for their helpful suggestions.

Patricia Fara

Clare College,Cambridge,UK CB2 1TL.pf10006@hermes.cam.ac.uk

Notes and References1 My major biographical source, to which I

make no specific references, is Desmond, A.and Moore, J. (1991) Darwin, PenguinBooks

2 Darwin, F. (1887) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin(Vol. 1), p. 49 and p. 170; (Vol. 3), p. 195 and p. 371, JohnMurray

3 Darwin, F. (1887) The Life and Letters ofCharles Darwin(Vol. 3), p. 223, JohnMurray

4 Darwin, F. (1887) The Life and Letters ofCharles Darwin(Vol. 3), pp. 225–227

5 Browne, J. (1998) I could have retched allnight: Charles Darwin and his body. InScience Incarnate: Historical Embodimentsof Natural Knowledge(Lawrence, C. andShapin, S., eds), pp. 240–287, University ofChicago Press

6 Figaro, 18 February 1874, p. 37 Paradis, J.G. (1997) Satire and Science in

Victorian Culture. In Victorian Science inContext(Lightman, B., ed.), pp. 143–175,University of Chicago Press

8 Browne, J. (1985) Darwin and theExpression of the Emotions. In TheDarwinian Heritage(Kohn, D., ed.), pp. 307–326 Princeton University Press

9 Newspaper clipping in the Darwin Archive,Cambridge (DAR 140.4:19).

10 I am grateful to Martin Rudwick for many ofthese points.

11 Darwin, C. (1872) The Expression of theEmotions in Man and Animals, pp. 14–15,John Murray

144 Endeavour Vol. 24(4) 2000

Figure 2 Photograph of Darwin, Maull andPolyblank, circa 1857 (courtesy of the Syndicsof Cambridge University Library).

Figure 3 ‘That troubles our monkey again’.Caricature of Darwin from Fun magazine, 16 November 1872. The caption reads: Femaledescendant of marine Ascidian ‘Really, Mr.Darwin, say what you like about man; but Iwish you would leave my emotions alone!’(courtesy of the Syndics of CambridgeUniversity Library).