He was one of the first scientists to propose that South America and Africa were once joined. The museum is the sole venue for the exhibition. It is organized by Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the museum. Humboldt — was a renowned Prussian naturalist and explorer and one of the most influential figures of the 19th century. He lived to his 90th year, published more than 36 books, traveled across four continents and wrote well over 25, letters to an international network of colleagues and admirers.
In these six weeks, Humboldt—through a series of lively exchanges of ideas about the arts, science, politics and exploration with influential figures such as President Thomas Jefferson and artist Charles Willson Peale—shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in the natural world. It includes more than paintings, sculptures, maps, and artifacts as well as a video introduction to Humboldt and his connections to the Smithsonian through an array of current projects and initiatives.
Humboldt encouraged American landscape painters to embrace our natural wonders as emblems of our cultural identity. As a country, we have much to thank Humboldt for, as reflected in the countless namesake places and species across our land. Church, an esteemed painter of the Hudson River school, features prominently in the exhibition.
Its inclusion in the exhibition represents a homecoming for the important fossil that has been in Europe since , and emphasizes that natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States. The skeleton, excavated in in upstate New York, was the most complete to be unearthed at that time. Humboldt amplified and encouraged these values in the first books he published after visiting the Americas, in which he began to articulate his concept of nature. Following the War of , the vogue for visiting Humboldt in Europe grew.
He became the center of an interconnected web of correspondents, colleagues and admirers, many of whom were Americans. From his perch in Paris, Humboldt played a central role in French scientific societies. The litany of American luminaries who beat a path to his door is an astounding array of politicians, statesmen, authors, intellectuals, artists and scientists. In Paris, Humboldt and the Marquis de Lafayette stood at the center of a group of liberal thinkers who supported the U.
Both men saw in American democracy a template for saving Europe from monarchical and dictatorial ruin. The mutual dislike between Humboldt and Napoleon serves as a framework for understanding how and why Humboldt sought faster and more reliable networks of communication across Paris, the continent and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean.
He befriended Americans who were able to enhance the establishment of those relays. Morse formed part of that network. He held an unequivocal stance on American slavery.
An adamant believer in racial equality, Humboldt railed against colonial rule and enslavement. He associated nature with an inherent right to individual freedom for all humankind, and he believed societies and governments must protect that right. Although he sidestepped engaging directly with Jefferson on the issue, he spared little anger in his correspondence with those in his close circle.
As early as he feared that the perpetuation of slavery in the U. Before he had left the U. Humboldt met the American artist-impresario and the 13 Iowa who accompanied him to Paris in For the first time, Humboldt had direct conversations with Native peoples from the U. The publication of Cosmos made Alexander von Humboldt perhaps the best known public intellectual figure anywhere on the globe.
During the s there was a conscious effort on the part of these men to frame Humboldt as a distant mentor. His two trips to South America were directly inspired by Humboldt. Church gladly embraced the opportunity to adopt a Humboldtian mantle for his artistic persona. Walt Whitman, ever his own idiom, deployed "Kosmos" as a metaphor describing his own persona. The idea that one could embody Cosmos , whether in a painterly or literary oeuvre, was a hallmark of the American fascination with Humboldt.
With the founding of the Smithsonian in , America was able to deliver back to Humboldt the benefit of its own far flung scientific investigations.
By this time Humboldt had his own emissaries to the Smithsonian, and every publication bearing its name found its way to him. Now the Smithsonian was poised to adopt a Humboldtian mantle. Over the years it would become the American repository for every branch of knowledge the Prussian traveler and natural philosopher had pursued.
Humboldt spent his lifetime increasing knowledge, and as that knowledge diffused, so too did the connection to his name. During the 19th century, towns, counties and streets across the U.
In he joined the mining department of the Prussian government, and promotion came swiftly. One observation he made which proved crucial in his later researches was on the magnetic qualities of rocks; he also invented a safety lamp.
In Humboldt's mother died, and he became sufficiently wealthy to plan a 5-year period of exploration. He started out in June , after studying various techniques of botanical research, meteorological observation, and height estimation from barometric readings.
The achievement was magnificent, for it included new material on volcanoes and on the structure of the Andes, with a vast array of data on climate and on plant geography. The Personal Narrative of this expedition was published in French in , and an English translation appeared in ; among its admiring readers was Charles Darwin. Humboldt was a splendid scientific observer. He saw that excessive tree felling could be followed by soil erosion, eagerly noted the relics of the Inca and Aztec civilizations, and in France carefully worked out the climatic conditions under which vines could be grown.
From to Humboldt lived mainly in Paris as a writer and scientist, still following researches into geomagnetism which eventually, in , led to the discovery of the magnetic pole.
0コメント