Both Audubon and Linnaeus were indebted to this intrepid British limner of the New World

When John James Audubon, the celebrated American naturalist, set off on a painting expedition to South Carolina in 1831, his entourage included a full-time background painter and a taxidermist. A century before, when a little-known British painter and naturalist named Mark Catesby tromped through the swamps and woodlands of the same state, he did so the hard way. Catesby hiked hundreds of miles, mostly alone, fighting off illness and infection, and eluding warring Indians, all the while producing delicate and brilliantly colored watercolors of wildlife unknown to Europeans. Lacking any other means of preserving the small snakes and insects that he shipped home to eager collectors in England, Catesby packed them in widemouthed jars filled with rum. As if the other hurdles he faced were not enough, a new obstacle presented itself on the voyage home: thirsty British sailors. The crewmen on the merchant ships sometimes raided Catesby's carefully packed specimen cases and, unfazed by the steeping creatures, drank the rum dry.

A less persevering individual might have given up and turned to gardening, but Mark Catesby persisted. During two extended trips to America between 1712 and 1726, Catesby produced detailed paintings and notes while at the same time shipping a steady flow of dried plants, seeds and animal specimens to his patrons in England. In so doing, Catesby laid the groundwork for his masterpiece, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. The enormous, two-volume book was the first illustrated flora and fauna of North America's wildlife and one of the outstanding achievements of 18th-century natural science. In 1747, Cromwell Mortimer, secretary of England's prestigious Royal Society, called Catesby's newly completed opus "the most magnificent work I know since the Art of printing has been discovered." The great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (who never visited America) relied in part on Catesby's work for his revolutionary classification of species. Thomas Jefferson avidly sought a copy of The Natural History, and Lewis and Clark consulted it before heading overland toward the Pacific. Yet in the 250 years since Mortimer's enthusiastic appraisal, Mark Catesby's work has fallen into obscurity, eclipsed, like that of the later, American ornithologist-artist Alexander Wilson, by the unrivaled brilliance of Audubon...

The story of how and why this wellborn but not terribly well educated Englishman became a pioneer of scientific illustration is hard to trace. Mark Catesby left no diary and few letters. No known portrait of him exists. Born in rural Suffolk in 1682, Catesby had a gentleman's upbringing and perhaps an art lesson or two but was largely self-trained as a naturalist. A bachelor for most of his life, he was described by a friend, not very affectionately, as "tall, meagre, hard favoured, and [with] a sullen look [and] a silent disposition." Much of what's known about Catesby's life comes from the text of his Natural History, which suggests a stoic, solitary man with an almost obsessive curiosity about everything from grain cultivation to the preparation of caviar. Richard Pulteney, an 18th-century historian, regarded him as "one of those men, whom a passion for natural history very early allured from the interesting pursuits of life," though Catesby would no doubt have disagreed. The early 18th century was a time of empire building. Exotic new species were flooding into Europe from distant corners of the world, and fitting them somehow into the Creator's divine plan was a central scientific enterprise. Botany was the reigning science, and the nurturing of botanical gardens was a popular avocation of country squires, among them one of Catesby's uncles. The young man may have learned to sketch exotic plants for him. Still, Catesby recalled later, he chafed at living so far from London, "the Center of all Science": "My Curiosity was such, that not being content with contemplating the Products of my own Country, I soon imbibed a passionate desire of viewing as well the Animal as Vegetable Productions in their Native Countries; which were Strangers to England."

Catesby first came to America in 1712 to visit his sister in Virginia, who had married a wealthy physician turned politician in Williamsburg, the colony's bustling new capital. Thanks to the hospitality of Virginia's clubby landowning elite, Catesby's stay in America stretched to seven years. The young naturalist, then in his 30s, spent much of his time hiking, hunting and sketching. One of his frequent hosts was William Byrd II, the owner of an immense estate up the James River from Williamsburg. In his diary, Byrd reported being dragged by Catesby into a nearby swamp on a quest for a hummingbird nest. One evening he lent his young guest a gun to shoot a bear on the property. "It was only a cub and he sat on a tree to eat grapes," Byrd wrote, amused by Catesby's excitement over a commonplace. Byrd had been sick all that day, but the diversion cheered him up, "and we were merry in the evening."

Catesby was enthralled by the American landscape, but he was not yet thinking of posterity. "I thought then so little of prosecuting a Design of the Nature of this Work," he wrote in The Natural History, "that in the Seven Years I resided in that Country, (I am ashamed to own it) I chiefly gratified my inclination in observing and admiring the various Productions of those Countries . . . only sending from thence some dried Specimens of Plants and some of the most Specious of them in Tubs of Earth, at the Request of some curious Friends."

Catesby's second trip to America, from 1722 to 1726, was more businesslike. This time, an expanded coterie of "curious Friends" was paying him for whatever he could ship home: live plants, dried leaves, seeds, skins, dead birds immersed in ground tobacco. Catesby's sponsors came from a small, tight-knit circle of English collectors, naturalists and aristocrats, many of them members of the Royal Society. Catesby's champion was William Sherard, a wealthy and well-connected Oxford botanist. Another backer was Sir Hans Sloane, later court physician and president of the Royal Society, whose vast hoard of natural and man-made objects was to become the core of the British Museum.

On his own, Catesby was planning an illustrated book of American exotica. During his second sojourn in America, this time in the relative wilds of the Carolinas, Georgia and the Bahamas, he resolved to document as many species as possible. That he did so in hundreds of finely wrought watercolors while at the same time sending specimens and even duplicate paintings to his nearly insatiable patrons in England is astonishing. He had to beg them for extra drawing paper, specimen jars and, at one point, 20 to purchase a slave. (There's no record that the last request was ever granted.) In his letters, the strain is evident. To Sherard: "I profess before God I never can be more industrious in collecting whatever I could possible meet with. . . . I wish I could know what you required and by whome." To Sloane, who kept demanding more of everything, especially snakes: "My Sending Collections of plants and especially Drawings to every of My Subscribers is what I did not think would be expected from me. My design was Sir . . . to keep my Drawings intire that I may get them Graved. . . ."

Eventually, he did, the result being the book that made him an 18th-century celebrity. As for his 263 watercolors, from which the 52 in the current touring exhibition were chosen, they have indeed stayed "intire" as property of the British crown. Before the tour opens, I pay a visit to the Print Room of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, where the watercolors have been housed since 1833. The library occupies several rooms in a warren of chambers deep within Windsor Castle, not far from the queen's living quarters. The decor here is high Victorian: nearly every surface except the floors is ornately carved. Lining the shelves are ancient tomes the size of tombstones, only thicker...

The contrast between the miserable working conditions then and the rarefied atmosphere of Windsor Castle today is striking. Looking at Catesby's original watercolors, I ask conservator Michael Warnes if the small blotches on the drawing paper might be 275-year-old samples of Carolina mud. No, he says, that's old glue. The works are actually in superb condition: "The density and depth of the color are absolutely perfect. None of it's faded because the books have been closed all this time." Though Catesby was a botanist at heart, birds predominate in his art. His colorful portraits of the wood duck, the scarlet ibis and various woodpeckers were, in their day, a surprise to the many Europeans who imagined the American wilderness as a gloomy and vaguely hostile place. McBurney points out one of her favorite Catesby birds, a luminous yellow goldfinch posed against an almost abstract grid of hundreds of tiny locust leaves. The foliage is as stylized as a subway map. Earlier, looking through The Natural History at Harvard's rare books library, I admired the etched version of this scene. Now, seeing the original watercolor, I'm struck by how bland and incomplete the print appears in comparison. Catesby didn't choose his pairings casually--he sometimes dissected birds to study their stomach contents before choosing which berries or blossoms were suitable for a particular portrait. This practice marks him as innovative, according to Amy R. W. Meyers, curator of American art at the Huntington Library in California and co-organizer of the Catesby tour. "Mark Catesby helped advance what much later became the science of ecology--the interactions of living things in nature," she says. Before this, illustrations of plants were typically flat, idealized forms isolated on a white background, like generic diagrams in a tree-finder guide. As for illustrations of animals, if these included vegetation at all, it was strictly as window dressing. An exception was the Dutch painter and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, who a few decades earlier painted elaborate and highly polished compositions of butterflies and caterpillars with the plants on which they fed.

Catesby's juxtapositions, however, went deeper--sometimes literally. He entwined a snake and a potato vine after learning that farmers in Virginia unearthed the snakes when harvesting this crop. He posed bobolinks with a gracefully arching stalk of rice after deducing that the birds were migrating from Cuba to the Carolinas to follow the ripening rice fields. (Settlers had thought the birds were disappearing each year to hibernate, possibly in mud at the bottom of ponds.) Expediency was probably a factor in Catesby's doubling up of species: without dual portraits, his book would have required twice as many plates. And some of his combinations--in particular, a ferocious viper being regarded by a sleepy-looking bull--seem utterly whimsical. "I think he was probably doodling," says Meyers.

Artistic flourishes aside, Catesby's intense study of nature had a highly practical side. "He was part of a network of people who believed that getting plants from the New World to grow in English soil was more important than filling cabinets with dried specimens," Meyers says. She cites Catesby's declaration that in a single lifetime "a small spot of land in America has furnished England with a greater variety of tree than has been procured from all the other parts of the world for more than a thousand years past." Catesby himself could take much of the credit for this botanical diaspora. Either through seedlings or the printed page, he introduced England to some species of dogwoods, laurels, acacias, lady's slippers, lilies and catalpas, among many others. On publication, Catesby's book was an immediate sensation. Its purchasers included not just English naturalists but the queen of Sweden, the Russian ambassador, the Princess of Wales, and assorted dukes, lords and earls. Hans Sloane, characteristically, snapped up five copies. Pirated editions appeared in French, German, Dutch and Latin. Acclaimed for this "curious and magnificent work," Catesby was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1733.

For all his achievements, Catesby's time in the limelight was brief. He seldom left England after 1726, nor did he publish anything to rival The Natural History. To make ends meet, he worked as a horticulturist at a succession of London nurseries and peddled his book on the side. Late in life, Catesby--ever the curious naturalist--arrived at a meeting of the Royal Society carrying a poison ivy plant he'd succeeded in growing from stock sent to him from Virginia. At age 65, and by now living in a shabby quarter of London, he was married for the first time. He died two years later in 1749. He left his widow and two young children little more than his watercolors, his copperplates and a few unsold books.

Catesby's slide into near oblivion since then has many reasons. The names that Catesby bestowed on many of the unfamiliar plants and animals he illustrated became obsolete with the adoption of Linnaeus' more scientific two-word classification scheme soon after Catesby's death. Colonial hostility, then independence, dampened the exchange of plants and information between England and the New World that Catesby had worked so hard to encourage. And, of course, there was Audubon. Though he, like Linnaeus, relied on Catesby, his paintings for Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838, clearly surpass Catesby's creatures as full-bodied works of art. Audubon created his dramatic and sometimes rather bloody tableaux by painting dead animals, which he posed using armatures and hidden wires. Catesby, too, killed many of his models before painting them, but where possible he worked from life. Ironically, his preference for drawing unfamiliar animals as he glimpsed them in the wild often resulted in images that look artificial compared with those of Audubon.

Finally, during his own lifetime Catesby's reputation faced an obstacle over which he had no control. Nearly 80 years before his birth, the Catesby name was sullied by a distant relation. A Robert Catesby had masterminded the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, which targeted the Houses of Parliament for destruction. Unfortunately, crime does pay, historically speaking. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has long listed Robert while omitting Mark. Perhaps an editor of the forthcoming revision will take in the current exhibition of Mark Catesby's charming watercolors and redress this wrong.