Splendor of the Grass

I never imagined finding such animated illustrations inside a book titled “Fodder and Pasture Plants.” It was published by the Canadian Department of Agriculture in 1913, at exactly the time, a continent away, Braque and Picasso, were deep into Cubism, and Kandinsky was pioneering pure abstraction. Were these oddly angular, calligraphic renderings of grasses the work of someone other than a traditional botanical illustrator? It turns out the answer is yes, but he wasn’t a starving expressionist with a beret. The artist was Norman Criddle, a noted entomologist who happened to seriously know his way around a box of paints.

Kandinsky paintings, 1910

Criddle was born in Englnad in 1875 and his family moved to Manitoba in 1882, where they established a farm. According to Memorable Manitobans, “He developed the “Criddle Mixture” of poisons to counter the grasshopper menace in 1902 and was employed by the government to demonstrate its use to farmers. He became entomological field officer for Manitoba in 1913 and was appointed provincial entomologist in 1919.” The Criddle Mixture continued to be used for the next 30 years. The Rocky Mountain locust of the 1902 crop threat is now extinct.

As a family of naturalists, the Criddles were responsible for considerable collection and documentation of natural specimens, and with invaluable long term record-keeping of flora, fauna, bird migrations and weather.

So much for art school.

Norman Criddle in his lab.

Source: Sabu-Sabu Natural Lifestyle

Norman Criddle with two of his pet crows.

Photo by Dr. R. D. Bird

Source: Sipiweske Museum

In 1906, years before “Fodder and Pasture Plants,” Norman Criddle illustrated “Farm Weeds of Canada.” The paintings are more traditional,  but as you can see in Clover Dodder, there are hints of the sophisticated compositions to come.

Vertical Alchemy

Though I’m used to it by now, I’m always acutely aware of how incompatible the vertical scrolling of Blogger is with our tradition of horizontal viewing. It's a convention that applies to everything from turning the pages of a book to watching the landscape from a moving vehicle. Even in this age of air travel and skyscrapers, our metaphors for time remain horizontally sequential. Time marches on, not up. We look forward to vacation, and think back on our childhood.

Try as I might to embrace Blogger’s inherent verticality, I often find myself frustrated at how difficult it is to display images that relate on a continuum. Even for individual images, expansive width is problematic. Horizontal pictures can get great play when printed on the spread of a book or magazine, but for this blog’s format, the wider an image is, the smaller it must be overall to fit into the formatted column.

Vertical scrolling, however, has its virtues. In fact, it turns out to be the perfect format for—are you ready for this—a vertical scroll!

The Ripley Scroll of Emblematic Alchemy, here, is from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and dates from circa 1570. I was curious to see what it looked like in its entirety, so I pieced together the full-length scroll from the 14 separate images provided. At the Beineke site, you can enlarge the images and study the glorious detail, but here is where, after 400 years, you can view this magnificent manuscript as it was originally intended—by scrolling vertically.

Note: There was a good deal of interpretive Photoshop work done to connect the pages that at one time were connected to form the scroll in the first place. Also, due to the image-height constraint of this platform, I had to break the full scroll into three long panels plus a small ender.

Embarrassing addendum, 7/12/11:
I awoke to find the first comment, below, from peacay of BibliOdyssey, directing me to a full-length, seamless version of the Ripley Scroll posted there in January of 2009. Truly embarrassing, because I can swear that I checked to see if the scroll had already been posted on that most likely of places.

Birds Head Revisited

Tonight is the first night of Passover and Jews worldwide, will be participating in a Seder. There are basically three components to a Seder—a story, wine (you are supposed to drink four glasses), and food. The ratio of storytelling, drinking, and eating, varies greatly from household to household.

For those not familiar with the Haggadah, it is the book that contains the story of how the Jews, after being enslaved in Egypt were liberated by God. Traditional Jewish law has it that it is incumbent upon parents to convey that story to their children as if they themselves experienced God taking them from slavery to freedom. There are numerous interactive components to the Seder in order to keep the children’s attention until the food is served.



I’m guessing that keeping children involved is what prompted illustration of the Haggadah. On account of the commandment forbidding graven images, traditional Jewish texts contain no images whatsoever. In fact, it seems that first illustrated Haggadah c. 1300, was from Germany and didn’t even show human faces. It was called the Birds' Head Haggadah since the characters where shown with heads of birds and other animals. The angels had blank faces.

The actual book resides in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.