Henry David Thoreau, the artist? New book sheds light on the author’s less known work
In a new book, Northeastern’s Kathleen Kelly delves into the little studied drawings in Henry David Thoreau’s journal. Where words failed, drawings helped catalog nature in ways that were more scientific than poetic.
Hear the name Henry David Thoreau and people might immediately think of his nature writing, thoughts on civil disobedience and his journaling during his time at Walden Pond.
While Thoreau’s writing gets much of the spotlight, his drawings also paint a vivid picture of how the transcendentalist writer and natural historian viewed the world, Northeastern University experts say.
In her latest book, “Thoreau’s Journal Drawings: The Power of the Visual,” Kelly, an English professor at Northeastern University, peels back the layers of the often-ignored drawings in Thoreau’s journal.
What she finds hidden in Thoreau’s often rough sketches of plants, animals, landscapes and nature’s many details is a legendary American writer discovering the limits of words and becoming a scientist who catalogued New England’s 19th-century environment in shocking detail. They might not measure up to the complexity of Charles Darwin’s detailed renderings of finches. But in analyzing what Thoreau called his “rude outline drawings,” Kelly’s book sees the writer working to make a new sense of meaning out of the natural world he felt humanity was so deeply connected to.
“He was dealing with the problem of representation,” Kelly said. “How do you capture an observation of the natural world for someone else? It’s almost like words weren’t enough, and his pen just went into a drawing.”
In the pantheon of American writers, few stand as tall as Thoreau. The 19th-century essayist and poet’s work, most famously “Walden,” delved into humanity’s relationship with the natural world, arguing for self-reliance and simple living. At a time when New England was undergoing historic levels of deforestation, Thoreau’s work shifted from pure poetry toward natural history and ecology, as detailed natural phenomena that would only become more fully understood decades or even a century later, Kelly said.
Thoreau’s journal chronicles that change. In 1837, as a young man, Thoreau started jotting down lines of poetry, literary criticism and philosophical musings. But in 1850, the journal steadily became a place for him to observe and catalogue nature and its many cycles and processes in more detail with words, data and illustrations. He started focusing almost entirely on taking rigorous field notes of the natural world in his home of Concord, Massachusetts.
Despite parts of the journal reading like rough draft material, full of meandering trains of thought and writing that would become part of later works, over the last few decades, scholars have come to accept it not as a novelty but as one of the writer’s major works, Kelly said. But his drawings were largely ignored.
For Kelly, a medievalist trained to study physical manuscripts on which imagery is just as important as text, Thoreau’s sketches were “hiding in plain sight.”
“When I first thought of the idea [for this book] and I did some initial research, I thought, this can’t be right,” Kelly said. “How often does a scholar get a chance to do something nobody has ever done before?”
In combing through the original journals held at the Morgan Library in New York City, Kelly realized how inseparable Thoreau’s drawings were from the rest of his work.
“He had to draw,” Kelly said.
He often used illustrations as memory aids, sketching a flower, footprint in snow or shape of a hill that he would later write about in his essays or journal, Kelly said. More often than not they were his way of capturing the natural world in mid-19th-century New England, Kelly said.
The rigor with which he noted cycles of plant growth, animal migration patterns and weather patterns became “much more systematic and much more observational,” said John Kucich, president of the Thoreau Society, the oldest organization dedicated to the author’s life and work.
The term “scientist” had only been coined in 1833, and Kelly makes clear Thoreau’s later writing and drawing is certainly more akin to science or natural history than poetry. Kelly points to Thoreau’s detailed tracking of forest succession, the natural process by which forests develop and change over time.
“He described the whole thing in the 19th century, and it wasn’t an idea that scientists finally accepted and understood until the early 20th century,” Kelly said.
He also detailed when the first flowers bloomed in spring, when birds returned after winter and what trees grew during certain times of the year. Details like this have started to give scientists a way to chronicle the climate change-induced shifts in those patterns, like how Concord’s spring now starts several weeks late, Kucich said. The treeless landscape of Concord that Thoreau observed at the height of deforestation has since been filled in with homes and replacement green spaces and forests, Kucich said. Humanity’s impact on local habitats and prolonged interaction with certain animals has also meant wildlife that would have previously stayed away from humans is now moving into more densely populated areas of the U.S.
Thoreau’s drawings also shed new light on the writer’s feelings about himself and his work.
One of the 20 drawings that Kelly analyzes in her book is a sketch of an angle, simply two lines connected by a point, that Thoreau seems to use as a metaphor for where he was in his life.
“He’s moving away, he realizes, from his family and the things all of his neighbors value into another place,” Kelly said. “The drawing is not of something he observed, but he captures a state of mind.”
Thoreau’s drawings reveal a writer “in the act of making sense of what sees,” Kucich said. As a result, Kelly’s book offers an intimate glimpse into the mind of a well-studied writer, who saw drawing as a discipline that required a discipline and almost meditative focus on nature’s details, according to Kucich.
“Paying more attention to how he’s seeing with his pencil is really revelatory,” Kucich said. “It’s that discipline of seeing in greater and greater detail that lets you see exactly how complicated and intricate nature is.”
