to Siphonophorae (1869–88), Calcareous
Sponges (1872), Arabian Corals (1876),
Medusae (1879–81) and Deep-Sea Keratosa
(1889). The trouble started when he strayed
from marine biology into human biogenet-
ics. Carried away by Darwin’s theory of
evolution, he sought to introduce some
Teutonic order to the vagaries of natural
selection. Darwin scented danger when
his young disciple sent him a copy of his
General Morphology of Organisms in 1866:
‘My dear Haeckel, Your boldness some-
times makes me tremble,’ he wrote, ‘but...
someone must be bold enough to make a
beginning in drawing up tables of descent.’
Haeckel’s illustration of the descent of man
in the embryology textbook Anthropoge-
nie he published eight years later showed
a chimpanzee, gorilla, orang-utan and Afri-
can up the same tree.
What do you do with a genius with uncon-
scionable views? If he’s an artist, judge him
by his art. Fortunately for history’s verdict
on Haeckel, his art has lasted better than
his science: while his Radiolaria have been
renamed Radiozoa and downgraded from
multicellular to unicellular organisms, his
dazzling draughtsmanship remains undi-
minished. It takes an illustrator’s skill to
describe such minutiae, but an artist’s imag-
ination to bring them to life: if the frills and
furbelows of Haeckel’s ‘Desmonema anna-
sethe’ (1879) evoke lacy lingerie blowing in
a breeze, it reflects the fact that he named
this particular jellyfish in loving memory of
his first wife, just as he later immortalised
his young lover Frida von Uslar-Gleichen —
lost to a morphine overdose in 1903 — in
the nomenclature of the jellyfish Rhophile-
ma frida. (His longer-lived second wife of 30
years, Agnes, didn’t have so much as a sea
slug named after her.)
It was Frida who assisted him with the
preparation of what would become his
most influential work, Art Forms in Nature,
published in ten instalments between 1899
and 1904. Coinciding with the birth of art
nouveau, its treasury of biomorphic won-
ders was plundered for inspiration by
architects and designers. Amsterdam’s
new Stock Exchange, opened in 1903,
and Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum,
launched in 1910, both boasted chande-
liers modelled on Rhophilema frida, but
the most extraordinary monument to Hae-
ckel’s art was the entrance to the 1900
Exposition Universelle in Paris designed
by René Binet after Clathrocanium regi-
nae, a species of Radiolaria resembling a
Prussian spiked helmet.
Haeckel’s influence on the fine arts is
harder to measure. The connections Voss
makes with Kandinsky and Klimt seem a
Exhibitions
Mothers’ ruin
Kate Chisholm
At the heart of Basic Instincts, the new exhi-
bition at the Foundling Museum in London,
is an extraordinarily powerful painting of
a mother and baby. At one time the ‘Angel
of Mercy’ was sold as a greetings card by
its owner, the Yale Center of British Art in
Connecticut, presumably intended as some-
thing you might send your own mother or
child. But take a second glance and you
might well wonder who bought the card and
who they might have sent it to.
In Joseph Highmore’s Georgian scene,
a young, fashionably dressed woman is
splayed across the canvas, her feet in deli-
cate silk shoes, a tiny baby, naked, resting
precariously on her lap. On her left cowers a
veiled figure in grey, resolutely turned away
from her; on her right, a huge figure in clas-
sical robes and wearing a pair of massive
feathery wings offers a guiding hand, point-
ing towards the buildings in the background
which are meant to represent the Foundling
Hospital, established in London in 1739.
Closer study reveals that the delicate pink
ribbon stretched between the woman’s
hands is poised around the baby’s neck; a
tiny pink brushstroke indicates the baby’s
tongue, gasping for breath.
It becomes clear that this is not a typical
virginal scene. The woman has been stopped
in the nick of time from strangling her baby
to death. But her fashionable silks, her des-
perate expression, the hooded, cowering fig-
ure all suggest the baby is the consequence
of rape, not wanton sex, and the woman has
been abused, ruined and now abandoned,
possibly by the very people who are now
looking at the painting. Her baby just-born,
perhaps on that very spot, arrives not in a
comfortable bed but in a dark cavern, out-
with the safe domestic space.
There’s a shocking immediacy about the
portrait, a sense that what is unfolding in
the picture is happening around you. This
woman could be your daughter, Highmore
seems to be saying. The picture, from about1746, was never put on public display.
Highmore, who was a friend of the artist
William Hogarth, a fellow governor of the
Foundling Hospital and responsible for the
image on the subscription roll, appears to
have realised it was way ahead of its time.
When it did eventually appear in a sale
catalogue at Sotheby’s in the 1960s it was
attributed to the more famous Hogarth, not
Highmore, and described as ‘An angel suc-
couring a foundling child’, the focus divert-
ed from the mother’s actions to the act of
mercy, of rescue.
Now at last it is being shown here for
the first time, and at the end of an exhibi-tion designed to show that Highmore (1692–
1780) was much more than just a society
painter, depicting the respectable front of
the Georgian middle class. His choice of
murder weapon — the pink ribbon — is a
very poignant reminder of why the Found-
ling Hospital was established by Thomas
Coram, a retired sea captain.
On his return from roaming the world
in the 1720s Coram was shocked by all the
starving, threadbare children he saw on the
It takes an illustrator’s skill to streets of his home city, abandoned anddescribe such minutiae, but an artist’s
imagination to bring them to life
little forced, but Max Ernst’s snappily titled
‘The Gramineous Bicycle Garnished with
Bells the Dappled Fire Damps and the
Echinoderms Bending the Spine to Look
for Caresses’ (1920–1) is a clear descend-
ant of Haeckel’s calcareous sponges. The
600 pages of stunning plates in this sump-
tuous book could win him a whole new
generation of artist followers, just as long
as they stick with the marine invertebrates
and avoid the apes.The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel is
published by Taschen.The woman has been stopped in
the nick of time from strangling
her baby to death