Spider's Nest, with the Valve
Description:
The top image, labeled "Fig. 1," is a spider's nest, while the image directly below it depicts the accompanying valve. The figure below the valve is a card of silk made from the spider's thread, while the last image depicts a garter woven from the silk.
Copyright:
Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Location:
Accession Number:
Thordarson T 4136
Associated Places
The British MuseumAmong the Numbers whom Curiosity prompted to get a Sight of this Collection, I was of Course one; but the Time allowed to view it was so short, and the Rooms so numerous, that it was impossible, without some Kind of Directory, to form a proper Idea / of the Particulars. (Dodsley xiv)Eric Gidal notes that the British Museum was unique in this unprecedented degree of access granted to the public: "As an institution founded ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public,’ the British Museum marked a union of legitimization and freedom both aesthetic and social" (21). With free admission came crowds, and with those crowds came anxiety regarding who ought to see the collections as well as how they ought to be seen. Over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the museum continued to gain popularity. By 1805, 12,000 people visited annually. By 1817 that number grew to 40,000, and by 1833 over 210,00 people came each year to see the collections (Goldgar 229-30). As many reviewers noted, large and often raucous crowds were now an inescapable part of the museum-going experience:
[T]he bustling crowds which thrice-a-week are to be seen in the British Museum, swarming with aimless curiosity from room to room, loudly expressing their wonder and disapprobation of the very things most worthy of admiration, or passing with a vacant gaze those precious relics of antiquity, of which it is impossible that they can understand the value as they are, for the most part, insensible to the hallowing associations, which render these objects the links of connexion between distant ages and our own. (“A Visit to the British Museum” 42)The behavior of these crowds generated considerable anxiety in the press, with one 1839 reviewer even going so far as to publish three “cautions” for visitors to the British Museum and other public exhibitions: “Touch nothing,” “Don’t talk loud,” and “Be not obtrusive” (“Synopsis” 302-3).
Associated Texts
The long title of the Museum Britannicum, a guidebook to the British Museum, is as follows:Subject
“Table VII, Spider’s Nest, with the Valve. The first two figures are of the next, Figure 3 shows the silky web, and some of it spun, and Figure 4 is a piece of a garter woven from the silk” (Thornton 70).Theme
Classification. Museum. Natural history.Significance
While a number of the Rymsdyks' illustrations in Museum Britannicum are visually sparse in terms of the number of specimens depicted and the scale by which they are rendered, this particular plate is replete with four figures that fill almost all of the available space. The Rymsdyks' work here operates in terms of a unifying characteristic: all four of the objects, two natural and two man-made (or at least formed by human hands), relate to the raw or refined production and manufacture of spider silk. Although both the images of the spider’s nest and the valve are meticulously detailed, their complex and irregular shapes jar with the more familiar figures of the carded thread and the finished product (part of a garter). Many of the Rymsdyks' chosen specimens are rare enough to have defied instant recognition on the part of the reader, but the juxtaposition of the spider’s nest with the thread and garter defamiliarizes it to a greater extent. While the repetition of the tiny, regular stitches in the weave of the garter is almost hypnotic, the grotesque and asymmetric form of the nest is difficult to visually comprehend. However, when all four images are read together with the accompanying text, they represent a distinct progression from natural production to a finished, man-made product.Not only did the Wunderkammern display artificialia and naturalia side by side; they featured objects that combined art and nature in form and matter, or that subverted the distinction by making art and nature indistinguishable. These wonders of art and nature juxtaposed, combined, and fused in the cabinets all illustrated an aesthetic of virtuosity. (277)In his 1762 guide to the British Museum, R. Dodsley seems similarly captivated by the capabilities of insects as the makers of natural wonders:
An Enquiry into this Part of Natural History is very amusing and entertaining, so great is the Variety contained in it; for not only every distinct Class of Insects has a Manner peculiar to itself to preserve and continue the Species, but every distinguished Part of each Class varies in this Particular, yet all of them follow the invariable Law that God and Nature has taught them; assisted by an Instinct, which Man, with all his boasted Reason, cannot with any Propriety account for. (159-60)Like the Wunderkammern, the Rymsdyks' precise drawings compare and emphasize the skill and technique of both nature and man as maker.
Bibliography
“An Account of the British Museum.” New London Magazine 4.40 (1788): 377-78. Print.Delineator:
Image Date:
1791