Part of the Milky Way, from a study made between 18. The best of Trouvelot’s pastels were exhibited alongside Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Heinz Ketchup, the first commercially successful typewriter, and the torch-clutching right arm of the Statue of Liberty at the first World’s Fair in Philadelphia - the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. (Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.) (Available as a print, as stationery cards, and as a face mask.) Total eclipse of the sun, observed July 29, 1878, at Creston, Wyoming Territory. The planet Mars, observed September 3, 1877, 11:55 P.M. Étienne Léopold Trouvelotĭetermined to make astronomy more accessible and captivating to the public, he set about depicting “the celestial phenomena as they appear to a trained eye and to an experienced draughtsman.” Using the era’s “great modern telescopes, provided with the most delicate instrumental appliances,” he made astronomical observations and translated them into stunning art, most remarkable of which were his painstaking pastel drawings created over the course of two years in the early 1870s - a period when Eadweard Muybridge was pioneering another revolutionary union of art and science on the other side of the country. Emma Converse - the remarkable forgotten woman who popularized astronomy a century before Carl Sagan - called Trouvelot “the prince of observers.” The aesthetic splendor and scientific rigor of his illustrations so impressed the director of the Harvard Observatory that Trouvelot was invited to join the observatory staff, which he did in 1872. He created more than seven thousand, among them some of the most beguiling contributions to our long history of visualizing the cosmos. Trouvelot published more than fifty scientific papers in his lifetime, but remains best known for his exquisite astronomical illustrations. Hardly anyone has championed the role of beauty as a catalyst for cosmic enchantment more powerfully than the French artist and astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (December 26, 1827–April 22, 1895). Until then, this fascinating tome has an excellent story to tell.“I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly,” pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin observed in reflecting on our ongoing quest to know the universe. It’s not within the remit of this book - which covers ‘astronomy’ rather than ‘space’ - but it would be nice to see a companion edition from this publisher on the art and science of space travel, which would further meld those two cultures. Indeed, the focus is on Western art, “where the tradition of representing astronomical phenomena has been more prevalent”, although the authors allude to works in other cultures too. In fact, it was Olson who advanced the “widely accepted idea” that the object in the sky of Bondone’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’ was not the star of Bethlehem but “a portrait of Halley’s Comet during its 1301 apparition”. There is also a bibliography and an index.Īrt curator, Olson, and astronomy professor Pasachoff, were brought together by the return of Halley’s Comet to the solar system in 1985 and have been collecting material for the book for over three decades.

Its 10 chapters cover the Sun, Moon, planets, comets, aurorae and many other subjects, concluding with some iconic spacecraft views. This well-produced, glossy presentation features more than 300 colour images of artworks and astronomical photography that ably illustrate our collective fascination with what lies beyond our planet.

According to its publicity, this book “charts the human love affair with the heavens in art and astronomy, based on sound science and accurate art and cultural history”, which further erodes the notional boundaries.

The older one gets, the more it seems that CP Snow’s ‘two cultures’ paradigm, which postulated a division between science and the humanities, is becoming increasingly blurred – at least in the fields of space and astronomy.

Astronomical phenomena in art