Finding Lost Voices: Sarah Stone (1760 - 1844) Who Drew the New World in Effort Beyond Imagination
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
One of the beautiful things about writing this column is how the stories of forgotten women come to me. Perhaps that’s because my focus has shifted. I’m always on the lookout. A few weeks ago when I was in New York City, I visited the Arader Gallery. (I wrote about this experience a few weeks back: how the walls were covered in Bierstadts and Audubon’s paintings of birds.)But what I didn’t write about yet is the exhibit I encountered on the third floor, called In Search of Mrs. The exhibit brought together the work of female artists of natural history whose work had been suppressed and almost completely forgotten. In this post, I hope to bring back one of the artists names: Sarah Stone (1760-1844). Stone was the first professionally recognized female British natural history painter whose works included many studies of specimens brought back to England from expeditions in the South Seas by Captain James Cook. Her illustrations were both scientifically and artistically important as they reanimated the flora and fauna found on these exhibitions.
Little is known about Stone’s childhood except that her father, James Stone made his living as a fan painter and had likely taught her his art. She learned to use local and even household ingredients for her pigments (brick dust, or the flower petals) and she would borrow techniques from fan painting in her art of still life painting. She was trained in the use of both opaque and transparent pigments.
Stone began painting at the Leverian Museum when she was just seventeen years old. The museum, called “Holophusicon” (a imaginary Greek word that means “whole of nature”) and housed within Leicester House, belonged to Sir Ashton Lever and opened in 1775 . It was filled with rare animals never before seen by the general public such as elephants, rare birds and bright shells from far off beaches in the South Pacific. The British Explorer, Captain James Cook gave Lever a considerable amount of the materials he brought back from his voyages to the South Seas.
Stone was a gifted painted and was soon hired her to paint the treasured parts of Lever’s collection, and thereby bring these objects back to life. As soon as the museum opened, the public flocked to see the curiosities most of which were dead and lifeless. But, thanks to the help of Sarah Stone’s expert painting skills, these dead objects were reanimated in her paintings. Her work was valued and exhibited as this ad from January 1784 shows:
Sir Ashton Lever, Holophusicon Is open every Day (Sundays excepted) from ELEVEN till FOUR. To which is now added, a large room of Transparent Drawings in Water Colours, from the most curious specimens in ferent articles, executed by Miss Stone, a young lady, who is allowed by all Artists to have succeeded in the effort beyond imagination. —from an advertisement for Holophusicon
Stone’s work was also found in places beyond the Leverian Museum. She drew and painted items for the British Museum and made drawings for three natural history book publications, John White’s Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales… (1790), George Shaw’s Museum Leverian… (1792) and Thomas Pennant’s A View of Hindoostan (1798–1800). Stone also exhibited her work at the Royal Academy, London in 1781, 1785 and 1786 and exhibited her paintings of birds at the Society of Artists in 1791.
When she married and had children her time to create her art was greatly diminished. She married naval officer John Langdale Smith on September 8, 1789, and they had several children. Marrying meant that her artistic name changed and after 1789 she began signing her work as “Sarah Smith" Her husband was often at sea, sailing to the West Indies. According to a note from her son, on one of his voyages, her husband brought her back a live bird that she domesticated and kept as a pet.
Stone’s expertise was in drawing birds. As the catalogue for the In Search of Mrs. exhibit states, “She fully committed to documenting in fine details these extraordinary species, which were probably a fantastic sight for the eighteenth-century Enlighted mind.” (118)
Stone's surviving drawings and watercolors remain important as they document a wide range of ethnographic material, mammals, reptiles, birds, fossils and shells that are now extinct. Stone’s watercolors are considered as “beautiful and highly colored” as anything from Audubon even though she is little known.
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October
October 26 -10:00 AM - 3:30 PM Creative Writing Retreat at Dominican University
Sign up to take the workshop, “Mini Biography as an Act of Revolution, a creative nonfiction workshop with Iris Jamahl Dunkle” and attend my keynote talk, “Taking Back History, One Story at a Time: Why I Write About Forgotten Women's Lives”
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November
November 1 - 6:00 PM- 7:30 PM - Catamaran Lit Chat with Iris Jamahl Dunkle - Catamaran Literary Reader - 1050 River St., Studio 118 Santa Cruz, CA 95060
November 7, 7:00 PM - “You Can’t Eat the Scenery,” The Life of Sanora Babb with Iris Dunkle, 101 Archer, Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, Tulsa, OK
November 13 - 6:00 - 7:00 PM - Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb - Book Club at Pasadena Heritage, Pasadena Heritage, 160 N. Oakland Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91101
November 18 - Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb - The Book Club of California | 47 Kearny Street | Suite 400 | San Francisco, CA 94108 (Attend in-person) (Attend online)
November 19, 4:30 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle in conversation with Matthew Stratton UC Davis Manetti Shrem Museum - 254 Old Davis Road, Davis, CA 95616
November 20, 5:00 PM Book Talk with Author Iris Jamahl Dunkle on “Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb” UC Berkeley, English Department (Wheeler Hall, Room 300)
November 21, 7:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle and Forrest Gander in Conversation - Clio’s Books, 353 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94610
December
December 1, 2:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Kristen Hanlon at the Alameda Library, Alameda, CA
December 11, 6:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Lisa Moore, Book Woman, Austin, TX
January 2025
January 24 - Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
January 25 - Reading with Jan Beatty at White Whale Books in Pittsburgh, PA
January 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Donovan Hohn at Literati in Ann Arbor, MI
January 28 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle at Morgenstern Books, Bloomington, Indiana
February
February 21, Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s talk at New York University, New York, NY
February 26, 6:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at King's English, Salt Lake City, UT
February 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at American West Center, Salt Lake City, UT
March
March 5 - The Bill Lane Center for the American West: Stanford, CA
March 13- 5:00 PM Garden City Community College, Kansas
March 14 - Books and Books in Key West, FL
March 21 - 2:00 PM New York Public Library, New York City
May
May 17 - 5:30 - 7:30 PM - National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA
Hi Iris, I listened to a wonderful interview with you on KRCB's A Novel Idea with Suzanne Lang. Talked about both your Sanora Babb book and Charmian London. You are doing terrific work!