The Scientific Vision of Women

Maria Martin Bachman, raised in an affluent home in nineteenth-century South Carolina, would have received the basic education that women of the time were allowed. Not a lot is known about Bachman’s schooling or young life, but she spent much of it caring for her mother, and eventually living in the household of her sister Harriett, who gave birth to fourteen children. There is evidence that Bachman’s first thirty-five years were filled primarily with religion, caregiving, and housework, and documents show that the Martin family enslaved at least four people.

It is not known exactly when Maria started work as a naturalist, but her scientific eye was refined in 1831 when John James Audubon became a guest in her brother-in-law John Bachman’s home. During his stay, Audubon and Maria began a collaboration that would last decades. She painted flowers, entomological studies, and backgrounds for at least twenty-two plates in The Birds of America. Although often not in the same geographic location, Audubon and Maria would have drawn separate parts of a page and they would be brought together later by the engraver.

 In the early 1840s Maria created drawings for John E. Holbrook’s North American Herpetology, including the snake seen here. After her sister’s death, she married her brother-in-law in 1848 and collaborated with him and Audubon as they wrote and illustrated The Quadrupeds of North America during the 1840s-50s.

Label by Meg Brown