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As far as we know, only one self-portrait by Charles Darwin exists today—a hastily drawn stick figure displaying all the dexterity of a primary school student. It appears in a notebook that Darwin used to record his experiments and observations during his voyage round the world (Chancellor and van Whye 2009, 545). Yet, much in the way that Darwin collated data from experiments that he, himself, could not perform, and sent emissaries to foreign lands that he, an invalid for much of his life, could not visit, he used the images created by others to represent himself and his ideas. In her wonderful monograph, Darwin's Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837–1874, Julia Voss offers a biography of this artistic Darwin, whose magpie ways led him to amass a huge collection of drawings, photographs, and charts and to integrate these images strategically into his work. She also brings attention to Darwin's own private artistry in notebooks and on scraps, suggesting (with a touch of hagiography) that his imperfect draftsmanship actually promoted his fascination with the messiness of the natural world. Most importantly, Voss provides a compelling analysis of how imagery figured into Darwin's thought, making several bold and persuasive claims about its pivotal role not only in his rhetoric but also in his own understanding of evolution. Evolution by natural selection would prove challenging to demonstrate empirically, and Voss shows how aware Darwin was of this challenge by bringing to light the subtle stratagems at work in his visual rhetoric. She argues that Darwin purposefully avoided depicting the bloody brutality of the struggle for survival in images, instead he used abstract and at times mathematical language to make his points. However, in the second great pillar of his theory, variation, he developed and refined graphically both in private and in his publications. Voss uses four images from the published works to make her case and organize her vast amount of material: the now-notorious finches from the second edition of Darwin's Journal of Researches; an evolutionary tree, the sole diagram in the Origin of Species; a series depicting the evolution of a feather in Descent of Man; and the portrait of a laughing monkey from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Spanning Darwin's career, these images allow Voss to cluster her material chronologically as well as conceptually. Around each of these loci she weaves other, broader, narratives in which …

Evolution for the Eye: Julia Voss's Darwin's Pictures