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IN NOVEMBER 2006 Charles Darwin's face began to emerge from a sidewalk in one of Boston's plazas. Created with salt and iron filings laid on gauze, the installation was designed to oxidize over a period of several months and undergo its own form of evolution. “The whole thing was one large natural process,” said the artist, Esther Solondz. Less than a year later, except for a few traces of beard, Darwin had all but disappeared. Meanwhile, on the Web page of Steve DiPaola, another mutating portrait is under way. Using algorithms drawn from genetic sequencing programs, this computer engineer/artist has grown a succession of abstract forms deriving from the well‐known oil portrait of Darwin by the Victorian painter John Collier. Like the iron filings, the computer‐generated processes play on the notion of change over time. Both installations allude to the closing words of Darwin's On the Origin of Species: “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”1 In them, viewers encounter the passage of time and the transitory nature of life. More than this, the modes of production call to mind the processes that are being commemorated. The artists have used transformative systems to create mutable images of the man who vividly brought evolutionary ideas to the public. In some respects, they echo the work of the British artist Tom Phillips, who in 1999 used brain scans and computer‐generated drawings to create a video‐loop portrait of the neurologist Susan Greenfield, of which it could be said that the image is the person as well as the achievement being celebrated.2

There are plenty of opportunities to look at Darwin's face during 2009. Most of the pictures serve as signals, for, young or old, Darwin's face nowadays conjures up a wide variety of associations that tend to support (and often unify) key themes in fields as diverse as history, economic theory, and literary and cultural studies, as well as modern evolutionary biology, biomedicine, genetics, and evolutionary psychology. Few organizers of a commemorative event would overlook the value of such illustrations on a poster or Web site. It is often sufficient merely to indicate, in outline, the shape of Darwin's head, with the great dome of his skull and prolific beard. Whether in historic photograph, portrait, statue, cartoon, or modernist graphic representation, Darwin has become one of the most easily recognizable scientists in the world.

This was not always so. Of course Darwin's face was known and distributed in various forms during his own lifetime, and increasingly during the anniversary years of 1909 and 1959, but this tacit knowledge was by no means as widespread as we might perhaps expect. In 1967, for example, Darwin was not included among the sixty celebrities featured on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, designed by the artist Peter Blake and often regarded as a statement for the era.3 The modern world may be flooded with images, as Nick Hopwood remarks in his study of Ernst Haeckel's embryological models, but only a few have come to represent whole domains of knowledge. To find out how certain images have become canonical, historical analysis needs to recover the story of copying and circulation.4 In the book publishing world, to take just one aspect of popular culture, market economics until very recently usually restricted the number of illustrations in standard printed works. Well‐established page‐to‐pricing ratios meant that most books published before the 1970s were limited to a four‐ or eight‐page insert of glossy‐paper reproductions in black and white. Beyond the academic cognoscenti, there was probably little appreciation of the range of visual materials relating to Darwin's Beagle voyage until Alan Moorehead's book Darwin and the Beagle was published in 1969 with sumptuous color plates. The same applied to biographies. John Bowlby's Charles Darwin: A Biography and Adrian Desmond and James Moore's Darwin, published in 1990 and 1991, respectively, were notable among other things for the generous number of illustrations that visibly developed the story line.5

Now Darwin is ubiquitous.6 The use of his image has undoubtedly risen in direct correlation with transformations in printing technologies through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the availability of digital and reprographic technologies in the late twentieth century, along with profound social, educational, and cultural diversification and increasing media interest in topical issues. Yet there is also something novel in the modern urge to replicate his image. The almost cultish replication—on Web sites, T‐shirts, car stickers, and coffee mugs—on the one hand surely takes much of its force from the striking and very recent spread of evolutionary ideas across the humanities and the modern academy in general. On the other hand, Darwin's high visibility, at least in the United States, is also stimulated by current controversy around creationism, reductionism, and atheism in science. For these reasons, Darwinian images are a fascinating phenomenon of the present century. Hundreds of images pertaining to evolutionary theory can be found on the Web; many of these are portraits, or derivatives of portraits, used either as stand‐alone images or as part of a home page or headline. Some of these have been manipulated to contribute to the perceived collision of global ideologies currently under way. Lots of them are humorous (see Figure 1). A good number of these images are distributed via email among evolutionary biologists, a friendly activity that consolidates professional values and networks. Not so long ago the same process rested on an exchange of photocopies of evolutionary cartoons. Much earlier, caricaturists such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson were able to broadcast their opinions about science and other matters of public interest through print shops and other forms of circulation. However, the modern media world provides unprecedented apparatus for building consensus or voicing dissent through images. To take a personal instance, students in my undergraduate class are asked to comb the Internet for visual representations of Darwin, used either for or against evolutionary theory, and describe the situating context. They are establishing documentary evidence that Darwin's omnipresence is essentially a Web‐based phenomenon that derives its punch from creationist controversies. Their findings contribute to the well‐established belief that the variety and geographical spread of images depend on closely related technological and social factors, in which print history and the diversification of distributive media from the nineteenth century play essential parts. In short, our current familiarity with Darwin's face is a media phenomenon that needs to be historicized. It is tangibly related to modes of distribution and the rise and fall of disputes in modern science.

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Figure 1. Rebel with a Cause. From a Frank Sulloway lecture flyer from 1996. Courtesy Skeptic magazine.

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In this Focus piece it is possible only to draw attention to some of the ways in which a handful of Darwin's images circulated in the late nineteenth century and to indicate a few themes regarding the visual representation of scientists that are already the subject of research. Even so, it might well be asked whether Darwin is the best figure with which to explore portraiture in the history of science. Another person might pose more unexpected questions. Einstein is an obvious case in point. Technological advances in photographic technique, for example, allowed Einstein to be backlit and hence appear in photographs as if surrounded by an aura. Did this visual imagery play any part in his rise to saintliness in the public mind? What of Benjamin Franklin, one of the most prolifically depicted individuals in early American science? Or should we more properly be looking at the way in which a porkpie hat resting on machinery evokes Robert Oppenheimer's presence? Such issues relating to the iconography of genius are important.7 Then again, so are social questions such as the consolidation of knowledge around particular images—as in the case of Shakespeare, of whom no authenticated representations exist.8 In this sense, a central issue often forgotten in the razzmatazz of Darwin's bicentenary year is to explain how and why this particular man, rather than Herbert Spencer or Alfred Russel Wallace, could rise to such prominence and be credited with so much.9 An analysis of Darwin images can therefore open windows into a larger field of inquiry. This celebratory year can perhaps in part confirm a commitment to rethinking the way we regard great figures in the history of science: there is plenty of room, it seems, to take a postmodern approach to the notion of fame. Iconic portraits can bear materially on the process of accreditation and the rise to historical prominence of an individual scientist.

It is also valuable to reflect on how Darwin nowadays represents much more than the theory of evolution.10 Over and above the achievement of his writings and the impact of his book, his identity is now clothed in legend and cultural conviction, and his name and image embody a number of beliefs that are deeply entrenched in Western society. For many today, he is a figurehead for science.11 He represents the power of observation and reason. He represents wisdom. Who else in the sciences might be regarded similarly, apart from Einstein and Newton, or national heroes such as Linnaeus, Pasteur, or Goethe? In particular, Darwin represents the separation of science from religion, and often as not his portrait on book covers and Web sites acts as a shorthand device to convey incommensurability between the two. These ways of thinking, I suggest, are distributed widely through the developed world. Although easy to state, such assumptions are far less easy to unpick. It is a moot point what might make up a visual icon of science. Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee's study of representations of the double helix of DNA sets out a useful frame of reference in which the images most familiar to the public are diagrammatic, simplified, and objectified. They bear little obvious relation to reality, yet are very real to us.12 If applied to people, these reifying qualities would probably be understood as “disinterestedness.” But disinterestedness in itself is problematic. Can this defining quality of science be expressed in generic terms, or is it expressible only in individual embodiments, as in the particular scientist concerned?13 If this is so, pictures of scientists are not interchangeable or generalizable. They can show only the individual mind. To be sure, by definition, an icon is unique, so how does an image of a scientist convey that only he or she was able to achieve what has been achieved? These are questions that call for answers.

If we pause to look at the general reader, we can also see that the historical Darwin carries a certain contemporary force. Many people admire Darwin in personal terms. This high regard might be a way of expressing an individual's allegiance to the idea of pure inquiry, wherever it might lead, or commitment to the search for truth, even if it involves personal sacrifice, such as conflict with moral or religious values. For example, Darwin occupies a special place in the heart of modern evolutionary biologists. This is a genuinely interesting phenomenon, and it would be good if the 2009 celebrations led to a wider recognition among historians of the special rapport that many biologists feel with Darwin as an individual. Ever since the 1950s, when Ernst Mayr's decisive writings brought classic selectionism back to the forefront of modern biology, and more particularly after the 1959 commemorations and the publication of the full version of Darwin's Autobiography by his granddaughter Nora Barlow, esteem for Darwin has become a significant element in many biologists' lives.14 One only has to think of the way Stephen Jay Gould, in his essays for Natural History magazine from the 1970s, expressed the motif of veneration. Gould may even have made veneration for Darwin a fashionable aspect of what it was to be a bright young biologist.15 Expanding on Betty Smocovitis's study of the 1959 celebrations in Chicago and Frederick Churchill's analysis of Darwin and the historians, it seems that there was a definite swing in the 1950s toward casting Darwin as an ancestor figure. Future work might explore the ways that admiration for Darwin rose among evolutionary biologists as they struggled for a place at the academic table during the decades when molecular biology came to dominance. Did Darwin come to signify the intellectual validity of particular traits, such as observational skills, fieldwork, and the classificatory tradition? Or is this admiration more recent, tied to the achievements of high‐tech phylogenomics? Darwin is probably more alive to modern evolutionary biologists than any comparable founding figure is to practitioners of physics, astronomy, or chemistry. This social phenomenon deserves study.16

Historians, of course, are just as vulnerable to biographical veneration across the centuries.17 But whereas historians of Darwinism can attribute much of the power of the past to an abundance of manuscript resources that provide unrivaled opportunities to follow the course of a major transformation in scientific thought (seeing the person as an archival resource), it is worth emphasizing that modern evolutionists connect in a real way to Darwin's personality. He is regarded as a good and honest man, a humble figure. His autobiography is admired. In fact, he is greatly appreciated for his niceness, which invites speculation about whether another leading figure from the past could serve a similar purpose. Surely not? Some of Darwin's high personal status in the modern West may suggest a new concern about the integrity of scientists—that one can be a secular thinker, let's say, and a good person too. Some of this personal connection takes a visual form, usually in some minor way, such as using Darwinian images as screen savers or posting pictures on an office door or wall. Certainly, an interest in possessing Darwin's face is not confined to people in the present—Thomas Henry Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, and Joseph Dalton Hooker also liked having a photograph of their friend. Yet this individualized and very personal respect has increased since 1859. Darwin can apparently function as a symbol of an ideal naturalist. In this sense, admiration for Darwin's personality might almost substitute for a modern biologist's soul.

Either way, Darwin's portraits have focused powerful feelings in viewers across the many decades since his death in 1882. Over time, his image has come to signify many of the most prized ideals of modern science, as well as reflecting a variety of social, personal, and professional commitments. A robust study of Darwin's iconography set in full historical and national context would therefore add materially to our understanding of the changing imagery of scientists and reinforce ongoing investigation into the shifting characteristics of scientific identity.18 Such a study would take seriously the modes of production and dissemination of images and the cultural conventions on display. It would be a history of making. It should also be a history of looking. While always taking Michael Baxandall's “period eye” into account, it does not take much, for example, to notice that photographs, paintings, and statues of Darwin rarely, if ever, include signifiers about his vocation.19 Unlike contemporaries such as Richard Owen or Ernst Haeckel, Darwin never posed with fossil bones, natural history specimens, or a microscope, objects that were the usual accoutrements of a naturalist. Unlike Charles Lyell or Alexander von Humboldt, he is never seen with books, maps, or manuscripts, the customary accompaniments of an author and intellectual. Instead, Darwin is shown as a generic form of early Victorian gentleman (see Figures 2 and 3). Over time, these images probably contributed to the notion that Darwin was a man set apart from the world. Indeed, by the end of his life it was possible to make a visual statement about the special qualities of Darwin's mind—his observational ability, his dedication, his research—merely by depicting Darwin's workplace, his study in Down House, Kent, even without him in the picture. These visual absences may have helped establish Darwin as a disembodied symbol of thought, wisdom, and sacrifice. It can come as a jolt to modern eyes when these well‐established imaginaries are flouted—as, for example, in a uniquely site‐specific and physically active scene of Darwin astride a horse in front of his country home (see Figure 4). Contemporary anecdotes describe Darwin's jolly demeanor and hearty laugh. These similarly run against the modern perception of him as a somber individual.20

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Figure 2. Charles Darwin, circa 1855. Albumen studio photograph by Maull & Polyblank, London. Published in Literary and Scientific Portrait Club (London, 1855). Note that Darwin is shown without any props to indicate his natural history vocation; compare Figure 3, taken for the same series. Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London.

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Figure 3. James Scott Bowerbank, circa 1855. Albumen studio photograph by Maull & Polyblank, London. Published in Literary and Scientific Portrait Club (London, 1855). Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

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Figure 4. Charles Darwin astride “Tommy,” outside the front door of Down House, Kent, circa 1868. Photograph by William Darwin (see A. E. Shipley, Darwin Centenary: The Portraits, Prints, and Writings of Charles Robert Darwin, Exhibited at Christ's College Cambridge, 1909 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1909], p. 22, where this photograph is described as “Lent by W. E. Darwin”). Cambridge University Library DAR 225:116. Courtesy the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

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It is good to learn that a complete inventory of representations of Darwin, to include portraits, photographs, sculptures, caricatures, and other visual imagery, is under way. It will replace the list composed by Richard Freeman in 1978 and the extensively revised list published in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). To give an idea of the adjustment in our knowledge base since Darwin's death, it should be said that Francis Darwin, in his Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), gave a list of twelve portraits in various media, accompanied by six engravings. The preliminary online checklist numbers about seventy items. These include three portraits for commemorative purposes and four for family use (which ultimately became part of the public record); twenty‐six photographs of various kinds, both family and public, not including reissues in different formats; at least twelve engravings of these portraits and photographs for mass reproduction in periodicals or as portrait frontispieces to books; twelve statues and busts; four medallions and plaques; and some twenty contemporary caricatures that include Darwin or allude explicitly to his theory.21 Herein lies the story of the making of a scientific celebrity. To map the interplay of visual images with the changing cultural commitments of successive periods, the rise of reprographic technologies, and diversifying commemorative purposes over the last 150 years or so would be a substantial achievement in our field.

Major steps in this direction have been taken by a number of scholars, including Ludmilla Jordanova in Defining Features and her accompanying exhibition of scientific and medical portraits presented at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in the year 2000. Patricia Fara has assessed scientific portraiture in relation to biography and self‐representation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.22 From their work it is clear that there are a number of issues relating to the visual portrayal of a scientist. First, scientists are usually—although not always—noted for abstract achievements that are problematic to convey without the traditional repertoire of signs and symbols. Second, the close interactions between sitter, artist, and audience should not be ignored. Third, different levels of self‐fashioning, questions of “ownership” of the image, patterns of intention, and visual conventions need to be explored. These issues encourage us to think seriously about the anticipated and actual audiences for such works, even though it is impossible to get back to the period eye or to imagine how people looked at these images, whether in original or reproduced form. In our own time, for instance, we are so used to seeing the faces of the past on gallery walls, on the Web, or in the pages of books that it is easy to forget the narrow circle of their viewers in the ages before art became an object of public attention and mechanized reproduction.

With these provisos in mind, it should be possible to push forward cautiously. Not surprisingly, the earliest images of Darwin were made for family eyes. Nowadays the most well‐known picture from Darwin's youth is usually referred to as “the Beagle portrait.” It was one of a pair made early in the 1840s to mark his marriage in 1839 to his cousin Emma Wedgwood. These portraits were drawn by George Richmond: each sitter was depicted twice, once in pencil and once in watercolor. The portraits were requested by Emma Darwin's sister Elizabeth Wedgwood. One set, probably the colored ones, went to Elizabeth, to hang in the Wedgwood family home, Maer Hall, in Staffordshire, and the other set either remained with the newly married couple or went to Darwin's family home in Shrewsbury, where his father and unmarried sisters lived.23 The point here is that some portraiture is made for domestic consumption. Yet as Walter Benjamin insisted, the uniqueness of a work of art controls its history. By chance, the Richmond watercolor portrait was the only picture of Darwin broadly contemporary with the Beagle voyage. As that voyage became increasingly significant in the history of science, so the image was increasingly reproduced. With continued reproduction it has become democratized, available in modern memories in ways that would have been impossible for the individuals originally concerned. The image, so to speak, has become emancipated from its origins, given fresh meanings, and placed in situations where it would have been impossible for the original to go.24 A small example of this is the frequency with which the portrait is published in reverse, with Darwin facing toward the viewer's right. This could be due to several factors. Art editors like to have portraits facing inward, toward the spine of a volume. It is also possible that the image is not being reproduced from the original. The picture, in short, has become divorced from its origin and is now a commodity available for manipulation.

Most of the remaining portraits of Darwin were produced for public display in various degrees. Even the ones that were originally private eventually became public. This interplay between private and public is indicative of Darwin's changing status in the public arena, exemplified by the production of a portrait in oils painted in 1875 by William Walter Ouless. The portrait was intended as a family heirloom. Darwin's oldest son William persuaded his father to sit for it and hoped to commission the pre‐Raphaelite Frederick Watts, who was then painting a series of eminent men for his “hall of fame” in the English National Portrait Gallery. Darwin had already sat for a portrait bust by Thomas Woolner in 1869 and for a number of drawings and photographic portraits by various artists, and he was by then familiar, if not exactly comfortable, with the idea that his looks were an object of interest to many of his fellow countrymen. For whatever reason, Watts was not approached, and Ouless visited Down House for a number of sittings with Darwin. He also painted Emma Darwin. When it was completed, Ouless exhibited the Charles Darwin portrait at the Royal Academy summer show in 1875. It was subsequently etched by Paul Rajon in a limited edition on art paper and then published as a photogravure in the Illustrated London News in 1877 (see Figure 5). This was the painting of which Darwin remarked in a letter to Joseph Hooker that “I look a very venerable, acute, melancholy old dog,—whether I really look so I do not know.”25 The pair of oil paintings was privately owned by the Darwin family until the middle of the twentieth century, when descendants arranged for them to hang in Darwin College, Cambridge. This college, named after Charles Darwin, was founded in 1964 in the former home of George Darwin, professor of astronomy at Cambridge University, second son of Charles Darwin. With the change in location, the Ouless portrait of Darwin took on commemorative and inspirational functions different from those it served in a family drawing room. Ouless also made a copy of the Charles Darwin in oils for Christ's College, Cambridge, Darwin's old college. The replication and adaptation of these images for different locations is an interesting form of visual heroization.

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Figure 5. Charles Darwin, 1875. Etching by P. A. Rajon, after the oil portrait by W. W. Ouless. Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

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Other significant portraits and sculptures of Darwin were commissioned under subscription. The purpose was the creation of cultural capital, both in the sense of making manifest the high value that subscribers placed on Darwin's achievements and as a material record of their role in promoting intellect and influence. The images were all public objects of one kind or another, intended to some degree to appropriate Darwin as a famous son. In the 1890s and early 1900s genteel civic competition emerged between the towns of Shrewsbury, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, and Oxford, each of which wished to claim a part in Darwin's life story by erecting a statue. Similar hints of appropriation were apparent in New York, where Charles Finney Cox, president of the New York Academy of Sciences, commissioned a bronze bust in 1908 from the artist William Couper. This was modeled from original photographs in Cox's private collection of Darwiniana (now housed in the New York Botanic Gardens). It was presented to the American Museum of Natural History and served as the centerpiece of its 1909 commemorative Darwin exhibition (see Figure 6).26 Twice life size, mounted on a plinth inscribed with details of the gift, and positioned at the visual apex of the exhibition, this monumental bust marked cooperation between two prestigious New York intellectual institutions. At the same time, the original Synoptic Hall of the American Museum of Natural History was renamed the Darwin Hall of Invertebrate Zoology. The accompanying commemoration speech, delivered by Hermon C. Bumpus, director of the AMNH, systematically remodeled Darwin's impact on American biology by celebrating America's separate and decisive role in the biology of the new century. (The Darwin Hall of Invertebrate Zoology was dismantled in 1940 and the bust went into storage until 1960, when it was returned to the New York Academy of Sciences for display.) A second cast was given to Christ's College, Cambridge, for the English commemoration later the same year.27 An additional copy was commissioned by the anthropologist Victor von Hagen as a memorial to Darwin on the Galápagos Islands, erected on Isla San Cristóbal in 1935, to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Darwin's landing. The inscription was written by Darwin's last surviving son, Leonard. In a curious way, these individual Couper busts, each made for such specific national purposes, have now become emblems for internationalism in science.

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Figure 6. Bronze bust of Charles Darwin. By William Couper, 1909. Commissioned by the New York Academy of Sciences and donated to the American Museum of Natural History for the 1909 Darwin celebration. From Anon.,“The Darwin Celebration,” American Museum Journal, 1909, 9(3). Courtesy Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University.

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Jordanova makes clear that commemorative works of art are intended to be displayed in community settings. Busts and portraits customarily decorate rooms or corridors where members of a profession or an institution assemble: entrance halls, dining rooms, meeting places, or sitting areas. Their function is to remind viewers of the achievements of precursors and to foster similar aspirations and values. The rhetoric of commemorative art is not the same as that of written or spoken discourse in that it is epideictic, adapted for display, and announces that this person has served his or her country and is worthy of memory.28 And beyond appropriation and celebration, these objects were at the very least intended to demonstrate the vitality of the subscribing bodies. In 1879 the Cambridge Philosophical Society raised £400 from Cambridge graduates to pay for William Blake Richmond (George Richmond's son) to paint Darwin in his red honorary degree robes from Cambridge University. This society claimed Darwin as one of its own on the ground that it was the venue in November 1835 for the reading of extracts from Darwin's letters from the Beagle, an important early step in Darwin's joining the scientific establishment. Emma Darwin felt that the William Blake Richmond portrait did not do her husband justice: the “red picture … quite horrid, so fierce and so dirty.”29

Two years later the Linnean Society of London raised a subscription to commission John Collier to paint Darwin (see Figure 7). Collier was Thomas Henry Huxley's son‐in‐law, noted for his history painting. The Linnean had more reason than the Cambridge Philosophical Society to regard Darwin as a prominent member. On 1 July 1858 Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker had read to members the joint communication from Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace that proposed evolution by natural selection, and Darwin remained an active contributor to the Linnean Society until his death. By hanging Darwin on their walls, the society was making several claims for scientific attention, not least by bolstering the role of observational natural history in the increasingly experimental biological sciences. Old friendships were involved; and pride in national achievement too. John Lubbock, Darwin's close friend and neighbor in Kent, was at that time the president of the Linnean Society, elected in May 1881; and Darwin's favored disciple, George Romanes, was the zoological secretary. Presumably Collier's relationship with Huxley was a factor in the allocation of the commission. The society's fellows generously subscribed to support the portrait, even though Darwin had requested Romanes “that you will not permit any touting for subscriptions.”30 It is worth noting that there was in 1881 no comparable groundswell of opinion to support a portrait of Wallace. The omission was rectified only in 1998, with a large oil portrait by Roger Remington that hangs in the Meeting Room of the Linnean Society next to the one of Darwin.

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Figure 7. Charles Darwin. Photogravure by Leopold Flameng, after the oil portrait by John Collier, 1881. Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

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Collier's taste for the theatrical was palpably demonstrated in this portrait of Darwin. Unfortunately, there are no documentary records indicating either Darwin's or Collier's intentions: presumably both the artist and the subject brought his own ideas about forms of representation to the sittings. The naturalist is shown three‐quarter length and full face, a solitary figure, his face mostly hidden by hair, his clothes a mere impression of cloak and hat, a compositional feature that allowed his eyes to dominate the painting. His expression can be read equally easily as benign or haggard. In art historical terms, it was an inspired idea to depict Darwin as if he were on his way outside, outside to the natural world where his theories were devised, away from the rigors of the desk or study. At one level, too, the portrait made visible Darwin's status as an independent private gentleman, for Darwin had no scientific position, such as the presidency of a learned society, from which to market himself. Collier did not paint a background scene, possibly a device to indicate Darwin's separateness from the world of public debate and controversy. Other Collier portraits feature much more staging. At another level, the effect was to emphasize the power of the human mind. Collier depicted Darwin as one who walked alone, who saw further than any of his contemporaries. His eyes were the centerpiece. This is not unusual for portraiture, of course, but the point deserves some attention. One of Darwin's water‐cure doctors, Edward Lane of Moor Park in Surrey, once said of Darwin that he was “all eyes,” always in tune with the minutiae of living forms.31 The words suggest that Darwin was regarded as the possessor of a special, contemplative insight, one that could apply as readily to poets as to scientists. Descriptions of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868 similarly mention the penetrating gaze of his eyes.

Collier created an image that may well have resonated with the public's growing conviction that Darwin was a hero of British science—a hero not in the mold of military celebrity, or even of literary or poetical fame, but one revered for his intellect, his powers of observation, his reticence in the continuing controversy over the origin of species, a respectable and domestic figure whose great mind had discerned the laws of nature in a manner almost matching that of a divine creator. There is much that could be said about the part that Darwin's beard may have played in these associations. It was a philosopher's beard, with religious overtones, as several of Darwin's acquaintances said. He grew it in the late summer of 1862, with the expressed objective of soothing his facial eczema.32 Its effect, however, was more pervasive than a passing medical event. When Darwin distributed a photograph of himself (taken by his son William) with this new asset, Joseph Hooker replied immediately. “Glorified friend! Your photograph tells me where Herbert got his Moses for the Fresco in the House of Lords—horns & halo & all.” The botanist Asa Gray agreed: “Your photograph with the venerable beard gives the look of your having suffered, and perhaps, from the beard, of having grown older. I hope there is still much work in you—but take it quietly and gently!” Darwin was delighted by the idea: “Do I not look venerable?” he teased Gray.33

It is almost as if artist and subject were playing with the Latin proverb attributed to Plutarch, “Barba non facit philosophum, neque vile gerere pallium [A beard does not a philosopher make, nor does wearing a shabby cloak].” In other artworks, Darwin seems to rely on his beard to portray (or hide) his personality, sinking his chin into his collar to fan the hair outward, brows furrowed, eyes cast down. His beard features obviously in the photographic record and subsequent reproductions in magazines through the 1870s and early 1880s. To a large extent, it had to feature, since it was the dominant aspect of his face. Nonetheless, photographers and engravers highlighted its texture and extent. As an aside, it is worth recalling that the interpretative possibilities for viewers were diverse. In the mid‐Victorian period a vigorous beard was not exclusively a feature of intellectuals and patriarchs. Full beards were also characteristic of soldiers, tramps, jailbirds, and gamekeepers. Clothes and posture actively convey Darwin's social status. Accompanying text established that he was a gentleman. Even so, as Darwin allowed it to grow larger, this beard apparently began to codify some of the things Victorians were coming to think about him. Darwin's beard shared distinguished representational antecedents with Plato and Socrates.34 It was reassuring in its religious associations, its benevolence, its suggestion of a wise father and patient friend. Such a beard hinted at hermits and holy men and even participated in the conventional pictorial attributes of the apostles. It was a sign of maturity. A beard, moreover, is a mark of masculinity—the real seat of Victorian power—and one of the more obvious outward characteristics of what Darwin described as sexual selection among humans.35 It was a gift to cartoonists when they got to work on his theories of monkey ancestry.36

Collier was agnostic and politically liberal, a forward‐looking artist who moved easily from portraits of contemporary civic reformers to idealized pre‐Raphaelite scenes of chivalric life. The possibility of visual allusions to a secular saint would not have been lost on him. In 1883, he painted his father‐in‐law Thomas Henry Huxley in a very different mode, casually holding a human skull (see Figure 8). In this portrait Huxley leans against a table piled with books; there is a gleam of combative triumph in his eyes. According to the conservators at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where the original hangs, there were formerly in the picture two ape skulls on the table, now painted over, presumably by Collier. These portraits should be taken together, as a pair, as Collier may have privately intended, for they were his only two images of scientists.37 Then, as now, the figures of Huxley and Darwin were linked as friends and intellectuals. These Collier portraits are powerful images, indirectly contributing to the post‐Darwinian evolutionary debates, perhaps helping to establish the growing prestige, secularity, and autonomy of late nineteenth‐century science. They were meant to be seen by as many people as possible. Soon afterward, three copies of the Collier Darwin were made, for the Royal Society of London, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Athenaeum Club of London, respectively; one more was made in the 1920s, for the new Darwin Museum at Down House in Kent.38 The portrait was engraved by Leopold Flameng in 1883, the year after Darwin's death, and has been reproduced ever since. Flameng similarly engraved the Huxley for circulation. One minor curiosity is the regular appearance of Collier's Darwin on cards given away with cigarettes—for example, in a 1901 series of great thinkers for Ogden's Guinea Gold cigarettes, an Australian company.

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Figure 8. Thomas Henry Huxley. Proof copy of photogravure by Leopold Flameng, after the oil portrait by John Collier, 1883. Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

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More than anything, however, portraits of Darwin were made available to the public through the new medium of photography. In the middle third of the century, photography was the dominant form of visual representation. Like many of his contemporaries, Darwin was gripped by its novelty and promise. From 1842, when he was photographed by the daguerreotype process with his first child, William, to 1881, when a series of portrait shots was taken outside at Down House by the studio photographers of Elliott & Fry, Darwin enthusiastically adopted this form of technology.39 His enthusiasm ranged well beyond any immediate concerns with self‐representation. He took himself, his wife, and his children to be photographed in London studios, encouraged his sons to learn the chemical processes and techniques at home, enjoyed exchanging portrait cards with his scientific friends, and tried as best he could to use photographs as a research tool, especially for his work on the expression of the emotions in the 1860s and later in some botanical studies.40 When William and Leonard Darwin were grown men they took a number of photographs of their father for the family album. These too eventually joined the public record, especially Leonard Darwin's photograph of his father seated in a wicker chair on the veranda at Down House that was taken around 1874 (see Figure 9). This image was reproduced as a wood engraving in the Century Magazine in January 1883 and subsequently entered wider circulation as the frontispiece to the second volume of Francis Darwin's Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887).41 Moreover, it provided the model for Joseph Boehm's marble statue, unveiled in 1885 at the Natural History Museum in London.42

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Figure 9. Charles Darwin, seated on the veranda, Down House, Kent. Wood engraving by T. Johnson, 1883, from a photograph by Leonard Darwin, circa 1874. Engraved for Century Magazine, January 1883, and reproduced as frontispiece to Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 3 vols. (London, 1887), Vol. 2. Author's copy.

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Darwin's emphasis on photography as the preferred method for personal representation exemplifies much of what we know about the rise of photography in the nineteenth century. The daguerreotype, rapidly followed by William Henry Fox Talbot's reproducible calotype and then the albumen print, appeared at a time when a range of social classes with rapidly enlarging consumer tastes and an increasing sense of individual respectability were emerging in Europe and America. These emerging classes saw photography as an ideal medium to represent their diversifying identities. New varieties of status could be visually affirmed by the portrait photograph. Such pictures also offered the possibility of a keepsake during times of great geographical relocation. In turn, the ostensibly documentary nature of photography appealed to those concerned with identifying and classifying people. Institutional systems concerned with surveillance and public order, such as the law and medicine, turned eagerly to photographs to record, classify, and control sectors of the populace, most obviously in the visual documentation in asylums of mental disorders and other forms of deviancy and the accumulation of anthropological images by racial scientists, imperial rulers, museum curators, and other interested parties. As a number of scholars agree, the Victorian classificatory project could hardly have gathered momentum without this access to new tools of identification, reproducibility, and multiplication.43

Here lies much of the value of “looking” at Darwin. Not only did he participate enthusiastically in the changing visual culture of the age, creating a personal visual record and using pictures to enhance his researches, but he also came into sight as one of several notable figures in Western culture whose lives and public reputations intertwined with novel forms of publicity and popularization. Many photographic portraits of Darwin were reproduced as cards for sale or distribution or were replicated by photogravure or other mechanical means in illustrated periodicals. In turn, the rise of illustrative material both in itself and as published in all kinds of texts stimulated a reciprocal demand for more illustrations. In time, Darwin emerged as a primary visual signifier for the potpourri of evolutionary theories prevalent in the later half of the nineteenth century. Not all reproductions were necessarily in print or paper form. Recently, a glass lantern slide showing a portrait photograph of Darwin from the 1870s came up on eBay.44 These were the images that brought Darwin to the public and from which the public came to recognize his face, whether they were interested in evolutionary theory or no. One of photography's most important effects was to take the art of depicting faces out of the studios of artists and place it at the disposal of virtually everybody.

Again, there are issues related to self‐fashioning to note. Photographs convey several concurrent and reinforcing messages, running from the layout of the scene to the title or name of the image (if there is a caption) and, in a more formal sense, the album or periodical in which the image appears. As Roland Barthes indicated in the 1950s, the subject of a photograph is worked upon: it is chosen, composed, and constructed according to professional, aesthetic, and cultural norms.45 So it is relevant to establish the practical processes underlying Darwin's encounter with photography. Correspondence and account books indicate that Darwin usually engaged professional photographers and selected the studio he wished to patronize, rather in the way that he engaged medical professionals. These were monetary, service‐based relationships.46 However, on at least two occasions professional relationships were integrated with personal connections. Darwin met Julia Margaret Cameron socially in 1868 and sat for her. Three photographs are known from this sitting, one of which he said he preferred above all other portraits. It is likely that the Cameron photographs were from the start intended for reproduction and sale, despite the social connection between the two families. Cameron marketed her photographs of Darwin as high‐quality prints, and at least two copies of these were issued by a Bond Street gallery with a facsimile handwritten endorsement by Darwin on the mount.47 The second instance involved Oscar Rejlander, the Swedish art photographer who practiced in London. Rejlander helped Darwin experiment with photographs of human expressions during the 1860s and was then commissioned by Darwin in 1874 to take a commercial portrait of him, perhaps as a subtle form of financial support when Rejlander was going through a bad patch. In these cases, the question of who authored and owned the image is hazy.

Alternatively, some photographs were commissioned portraits to be included in published album collections, such as Lovell Reeve and Edward Walford's series Portraits of Men of Eminence (1863–1867) or the compilation of portraits taken by the photographer Ernest Edwards and published by Walford in 1868 as Representative Men in Literature, Science, and Art.48 Such albums were published with titles that commemorated various professional groupings in Victorian England—for example, The Bench and the Bar or The Church of England Portrait Gallery, both issued by the studio of Mason & Company from 1858 to 1861, and J. E. Mayall's Royal Album in 1860. When Darwin—or other noted scientists—appeared in one of these compilations it indicated the rising place of science in nineteenth‐century culture (see Figure 2). In these understudied volumes, the relationship between text and image is conceptually indistinct. Whereas images are traditionally thought to illustrate the text, here the text illustrates and bestows cultural meaning on the pictures. As W. J. T. Mitchell remarks in Picture Theory, all forms of communication are in essence mixed media that combine different codes, discursive conventions, and sensory and cognitive models. Attempts to describe the interaction between visual and verbal forms (Mitchell's image/text) need also to trace their connections to issues of power and value.49 Illustrated biographical encyclopedias like these, with their linking of portraiture and concise, laudatory textual accounts of the subject's achievements, were compelling instruments of fame in the nineteenth century.

The composition adopted was formulaic. Darwin was mostly photographed indoors, lit by daylight from the studio windows, as was common at the time, although there are a few extant images that suggest artificial light on his face. He sat in a studio chair, in three‐quarter profile, usually facing to the viewer's left, hands in his lap. There are no painted backdrops, draped curtains, or potted palms, but occasionally a small table with a cloth. Because of the long exposure times, Darwin would probably have employed a headrest, which may explain his occasional uncomfortable expression. Cameron used natural top light to emphasize his eyebrows and the expanse of his skull. A close‐up by Rejlander showed Darwin facing to the viewer's right, as did several later cartes de visite produced commercially by Elliott & Fry. Some full‐face images were produced by Studio Barraud in the 1870s.

It sounds almost too obvious to say that there was no color in the resultant image, but this is an important part of how we now conceptualize the pictures. In fact, to see Darwin in color can come as a surprise and runs counter to the general perception of him as a sober paterfamilias. A newly discovered oil portrait of Darwin, painted in later life by a female friend (and now on show in the 2009 exhibition “Endless Forms”), reveals a coat in a deep shade of green. In the Richmond watercolor portrait, the young Darwin wears a brown topcoat with a bright blue vest. Nowadays, it is possible to encounter Darwin in colored form on the Web. One often‐reproduced image shows a Woodburytype, engraved from the Rejlander photograph, reversed, with Darwin in a purple vest. Assuredly, these images do not ask us to reconceptualize Darwin as a peacock. In the Ouless portrait he wears a black coat, and Collier depicts him in a grey cloak with a dark collar. Yet our perceptions of a sepia‐toned figure are mostly governed by the media through which we view him.

In these portrait images Darwin almost always chose to wear a soft‐collared shirt, heavy overcoat, and vest (seen in Figures 2 and 11). If one looks closely, it is apparent that he did not choose the same topcoat for every photograph. The lapels and buttons vary, and the vest and necktie vary too. In photographs taken around 1881 by Elliott & Fry (see Figure 10), in which Darwin was photographed outdoors, he wears the same cloak (possibly the fur‐lined coat given to him by his children) and soft black hat as he does in the Collier oil portrait. These outer details, unobtrusive as they are, mark the sitter as a quiet English gentleman. Indeed, this is who he was. Even though Victorian photographers regularly explored different genres, it would have been unusual to see a man of Darwin's social background posing for a portrait photograph in his shirtsleeves: until well after World War II, it was still customary in elite British society to dress formally for a portrait.

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Figure 10. Charles Darwin, standing on the veranda, Down House, Kent, ca. 1881. Photograph by Elliott & Fry, London. This is one of three known images taken in this sitting. Courtesy Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

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Finally, the technical treatment and production values oscillated from photographer to photographer. In all of them, however, the light plays noticeably on Darwin's beard and eyebrows, his most characteristic facial features. No known negatives of any of these photographs survive. Presumably they were whole‐plate images (6½ inches × 8½ inches) that were subsequently adjusted to provide card and cabinet formats. One photograph was taken by the Stereoscopic process, in which two separate images were printed side by side and viewed through a patented machine, the Stereoscope. At least two versions from that sitting are known.50

As an aside, it is again almost too obvious to state that Darwin was usually photographed alone. Except for a studio daguerreotype of him and his first son, William, made in 1842 (with a painted backdrop), all the known images show him as an autonomous figure. This did not need to be so. In November 1869, for example, the German biographer Adolf Bernhard Meyer proposed a joint photograph of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to illustrate his German translation of their 1858 article “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties.” Such a remarkable double image would have had tremendous historic (and commercial) value, but the suggestion was rejected by Darwin. Nor are there any known photographs of Darwin and his wife together, as there are of Michael and Sarah Faraday.51 Individual portrait photographs, it must be assumed, were therefore undertaken by Darwin as a professional visual record of himself, usually so that he might purchase multiple copies in reduced format to distribute to friends and followers. Self‐fashioning thus came most evidently with the possibility of reproducibility and purchase for mass distribution. Darwin visited a number of London studios for such purposes over several decades, and payments were recorded in his account books.

On the larger scale, portrait photographs also proved an effective element in the growing publicity machinery of nineteenth‐century life. Increasingly a form of national propaganda, and susceptible to deft manipulation by monarchs and heroes, these images could be marshaled by journalists and editors to cultivate popular support. It is said that Abraham Lincoln was photographed between 104 and 132 times between 1847 and his death in 1865. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert freely used photographs reproduced in the press as a means of presenting themselves as domestic icons who shared the middle‐class values of their subjects.52 The huge success of the carte de visite was a key part of this practice. By 1865 or so, photographic technologies in the developed world had improved sufficiently to allow the mass production of studio portraits on small cards, often incorporating a facsimile of the sitter's signature. Darwin was as willing as any other middle‐class Victorian to join the craze for exchanging cartes de visite with correspondents. He posed several times for photographic cards like these and made use of them as an autograph to send through the post (see Figure 11).

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Figure 11. Charles Darwin, carte de visite, circa 1874. Studio photograph by Elliott & Fry, London. Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

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What bears emphasizing about this process is just how much commercial activity surrounded the carte de visite business.53 Professional photographers who were commissioned to take a portrait shot might also supply the sitter with packets of cards for private use. If so, and if the subject or photograph was notable in some way, they often also obtained agreements that they might sell duplicates for profit in their shops. The Photographic Journal for 1862 recorded that one London studio was selling £50 worth of portrait cards daily and that more than fifty thousand items passed through the hands of another dealer in a single month. “The public are little aware,” said an author in Once a Week, “of the enormous sale of the cartes de visite of celebrated persons. An order will be given by a wholesale house for 10,000 of one individual—thus £400 will be put into the lucky photographer's pocket who happens to possess the negative.”54 In Britain, until the Copyright Act of 1862, the sitter had no control over the ownership of images. Not surprisingly, to market a photograph of Darwin during the controversy about the Origin of Species was a sound commercial proposition. In October 1862 the London firm of Maull & Polyblank wrote to Darwin, via his brother Erasmus, asking for permission to reproduce and sell an image previously taken by the firm. “Polyblank says that for some he has a general order to sell & for others he requires special permission so I shd. think you might as well give a general order as it is a good photograph.” The photograph under discussion was probably the image of Darwin seated in left profile, wearing brightly checked trousers, tie, and waistcoat (see Figure 12 and cover, cropped for a carte de visite).55 This photograph, originally taken in the later 1850s, was produced by Maull & Polyblank in many different formats through Darwin's lifetime, sometimes cropped for cartes de visite, sometimes as half‐sized albumen prints, and on one occasion reissued as an art portrait with wide borders and facsimile signature, dated 1854 (now thought to be inaccurate). The same image was further engraved on wood by the American artist G. Kruell for Harper's Magazine in October 1884. It was republished in this format as the frontispiece to Volume 1 of Francis Darwin's Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. Darwin was well aware that the various public forms of his image had financial value, although he did not seem to regard this as an imposition. On 6 June 1877 he sent six photographs of himself as a contribution to a correspondent's charity.

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Figure 12. Charles Darwin. Wood engraving from a photograph by Maull & Fox, London (precursors to Maull & Polyblank), circa 1857. Engraved in reduced form by G. Kruell for Harper's Magazine, October 1884, and reproduced as frontispiece to Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 3 vols. (London, 1887), Vol. 1. Author's copy.

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By the last two years of Darwin's life, virtually all that the public saw in published photographs and photogravures were his beard and his eyes. The final photographs were taken in 1881 or so by Elliott & Fry. The shoot was outdoors at his home, Down House, with Darwin leaning against an upright post of the veranda. The three known images (maybe four) from this sitting evoke wisdom and frailty combined (see Figure 10). At that point, it might be imagined, the desire of the public to see the face of someone in the news, someone of national importance, was interweaving with a growing interest in Darwin's personal life or even some early psychological interest in what it might be like to be Darwin—to be the man who, by popular account, abolished the Creator from nature and dedicated his precarious health to science. To identify reflections like these would materially help the historian in understanding the construction of Darwin as a scientific hero. While the visual can play only a part in the more comprehensive processes of the emergence of historical status, it is surely a significant part.

For portraits never exist in isolation. On the one hand, they are made to be seen. For this reason they have a role in our research into the manner by which commonplace understandings of science are shaped. Images of Darwin fall into the stylized, historically familiar category of philosophical inquirer—one that was different from newer, dynamic forms of imagery associated with other scientific individuals of the period, such as James Watt or Louis Pasteur.56 The strengthening—and divergence—of these styles of representation is an intriguing aspect of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century science that could be further explored. On the other hand, images do not speak with an independent voice. Darwin's portraits were necessarily mediated and construed through the cultural conventions and expectations of the day. The system of circulation mattered. Some took on new meanings with additional forms of circulation, especially in popular print. In particular, illustrations of Darwin abounded after his death, in biographical memoirs, obituaries, and journal articles. Prime among these were the volumes of Darwin's correspondence, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by Francis Darwin in 1887, and More Letters, issued in 1903 in association with A. C. Seward, in which a number of portraits were mechanically reproduced in close physical juxtaposition with Darwin's own account of himself, as expressed freely in letters and autobiographical recollections. It should be feasible to add these illustrated lives and letters and biographical memoirs to the usual documentary sources consulted by historians of the nineteenth century. A long‐running series called “Gallery of Scientific Worthies,” published in Nature, is worth attention, as are the captions to images and classified sale catalogues of cartes de visite and their twentieth‐century descendant, the cigarette card.

This essay has drawn attention to the histories of making and looking at portraits. A more extensive study of Darwin's portraits would provide a fine opportunity to explore the role of iconography in the history of science and the changing imagery of scientists through the ages. Far from a narrow exercise in biographical reification, the study of scientific portraiture has much to tell us about the making of renown—or its absence—in specific social contexts and indicates something of the complex combination of factors that come into play in establishing the ways in which an individual becomes eminent, either in his or her lifetime or afterward. Figures as varied as Einstein, Byron, and Queen Victoria already provide trenchant models. Of course, we have to take a circumspect view. Darwin was never prominent enough to be replicated as a waxwork in Madame Tussaud's museum, a kind of visual newspaper that opened in London in 1835, bringing the ordinary public face‐to‐face with images of people in the headlines.57 He did not have items of clothing named after him, as did General Cardigan, or a nation, as did Cecil Rhodes. He did not come to represent a people's history, as did Robert Burns. Nor was he one of the four eminent Victorians debunked in 1918 by Lytton Strachey. For Strachey, Darwin was not a man for debunking: he was on the side of the moderns.58 However, there is much that can be discerned from portraiture in the mass media about the rise or fall of public attention to science. And looking further afield, it seems possible that scholars interested in the biographical mode of inquiry could find a fresh direction were they to think more concretely about portraits. Too long underplayed as presenting simple narrative trajectories, biographical studies of scientists now promote robust new forms of historiography, as evidenced by Desmond and Moore's pathbreaking account of Darwin in social and political context.59 Biographical research is an excellent tool for exploring the construction of fame, in that an author can move freely back and forth from the subject's lifetime into the mythologies and representations beyond. To follow the increasing visibility of individual figures through various media is an exciting way to track the features of celebrity, as much for scientists as for any other group of practitioners.