The Charming Doodles Charles Darwin's Children Left All Over the Manuscript of...

[demmiblue]

The Charming Doodles Charles Darwin’s Children Left All Over the Manuscript of ‘On the Origin of Species’

From fish with legs to carrot cavalries, an endearing testament to the human life of science.

In contemplating family, work, and happiness, Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) proclaimed: “Children are one’s greatest happiness, but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none.” And yet he and Emma had ten. Adept at weighing the pros and cons of family life with equal parts earnestness and irreverence, he clearly concluded that the happiness far outweighs the misery.

There is no more endearing a testament to how this balance skews — to both the exuberant happiness that children bring and the benign misery of the innocent waywardness — than the doodles Darwin’s children left on the back-leaves and in the margins of his Origin of Species manuscript draft, recently digitized by the American Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the Cambridge University Library.

At age 8, George Howard Darwin, who grew up to be an astronomer and a mathematician, draws an entire visual taxonomy of the British infantry; Francis Darwin, who followed in his father’s footsteps and became a botanist, draws a warring salad; on a dummy envelope, an unidentified child produces a charming caricature of Darwin himself.

From a fish with legs to a fruit-and-vegetable cavalry, these irrepressibly joyful drawings, some inspired by natural history and some by the typical staples of boyhood fantasy, bespeak the inseparability of science and life — here is one of the greatest scientists of all time, who forever changed humanity’s relationship to itself, and here are the inked imprints of his own life’s most human dimension.











https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/06/charles-darwin-children-doodles-origin-of-species/

[CatMor]

1. So incredibly charming ....

it is folk art at its finest. I would love to see it in person.

[hedda_foil]

2. Madvelous. His kids showed real creative talent

[BigmanPigman]

3. If you look at all of them at the link

you can see how sophisticated these "doodles" are.

[hunter]

4. It was clearly a family that valued and celebrated the arts and sciences.

I think children are born with vast potentials of curiosity and imagination. Unfortunately, in many cultures these qualities are starved or beaten out of them.

I didn't realize how lucky I was to grow up in a house full of books and art supplies, how lucky me and my siblings were to have parents who encouraged us to read, write, draw, experiment and imagine. When I was teaching science I saw kids who were literally afraid to do any of those things. When I met their parents or otherwise learned about their living situations it wasn't hard to guess why.

Our President Trump seems to be the sort of person who had the curiosity beaten out of him. I imagine if Trump as a child ever drew a fish with legs then his dad told him it was stupid and his mom told the nanny throw away the crayons.

My mom kept a lot of my own childhood art and gave it to me on my fiftieth birthday when I was sure to appreciate it, now that my own kids were grown up and moved away. My wife and I have kept a lot of our children's art and maybe my mom has started a tradition. We shall see.

[BigmanPigman]

5. So did my parents.

We had a permanent stack of blank paper in the basement that we used for drawing. We never used coloring books and were very creative and imaginative. My first drawing of a person with a head and arms and legs was from when I was two years old. It must have worked since I ended up becoming an artist and my sister an architect. Of course professions in the Arts do not pay well, if you can find a job that is. Eventually I had to put myself through college for a teaching degree on top of my BFA. My students were thrilled to have an artist as a teacher. It came in handy and was very useful in elementary school where they no longer have art teachers.

[3catwoman3]

6. I still have a "painting" that my now-26 yr old...

...did at daycare when he was about 2 1/2. The technique used that day was the paint-something-on-one-side-and-fold-it-over mirror image method. It was a large red circle, with a green thing at the top. Looked rather like an apple. I committed one of the cardinal sins of parenting, and rather than asking my son to tell me about his picture, I said, “Taylor, what’s that a picture of?”

His perfect 2 1/2 year old answer - “It’s a picture of paint.”

[demmiblue]

7. That is hilarious!