Picturing Nature: Gender and the Politics of Natural‐Historical Description in Eighteenth‐Century G dańsk/ D anzig

The concept of ‘description’ has increasingly come under scrutiny in the history of science. This paper explores eighteenth‐century debates over description through the case study of a scientific family in G dańsk (the former D anzig). There, on the shores of the B altic, physician J ohann P hilipp B reyne took L atin notes on naturalia, while several of his daughters drew and painted vivid representations of them ‘from life’ and one daughter wrote ‘poetical descriptions’ of them. In the B reyne family's work, different forms of description of the natural world were juxtaposed to reveal what might be termed a gendered politics of description.