The Scientific Vision of Women

Before she was twenty, Orra White Hitchcock combined art and science in her teaching at the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. For the subsequent thirty years, Orra would produce many hundreds of drawings, paintings, lithographs, and linen wall hangings to illustrate lectures and textbooks on botany, zoology, geology, and anatomy. Many would help elevate the geologic work of her husband, Edward Hitchcock, an early geologist, professor, and eventually president of Amhurst. In the first summer of marriage, Orra and Edward conducted a joint all-biota survey of the landscape surrounding their home, a project that resulted in Orra’s stunning miniature book of watercolors of fungi, entitled “Fungi selecti picti.” This project would mark the first of their many collaborative projects throughout their lives. 

Orra White Hitchcock was not only one of America’s first scientific illustrators, but her work today is receiving newfound praise and notoriety. A recent exhibition of her work staged at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City received remarkably positive reviews. The New York Times review, “Love in a Time of Science” (referring to Orra and Edward’s lifelong relations), asserts that Orra’s work “demands we… understand an age when science was not so rigidly delimited, and stretched beyond the natural world to encompass theology and art.”

Label by Dan Richter