Strikingly original and abundantly illustrated, The Art of Biodiversity surveys the golden age of natural history art, exploring the alliance between scientists and artists that first revealed the astonishing diversity of life on Earth.
THE ART OF BIODIVERSITY:
Artists & Naturalists, 1700–1900
by Eric Himmel
Abrams, April 2026
With more than 330 color illustrations of surpassing beauty, this book reveals a story about art that’s not in the art history books, and a story about science that’s missing from histories of science. Here, such giants as Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, Humboldt, and Darwin cross paths with superb artists, including Merian, Redouté, Audubon, and Haeckel, among many others.
An essential visual companion to popular narratives like Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature and Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, this volume provides a definitive archival record of the era that defined modern biology.
Between 1700 and 1900, an art movement unveiled nature’s great secret: the global diversity of life-forms. Centuries before the word “biodiversity” existed, naturalists began to glimpse the reality that lay behind Charles Darwin’s lyrical evocation of nature’s “endless forms most beautiful.”
The naturalists recruited artists to create a family album of Earth, with every picture a precise drawing of a species of plant or animal, and so science and art, for the first and last time, went exploring together.
This art first appeared in vividly illustrated books that, in a world without photography or film, offered readers a vastly expanded vision of nature. The Art of Biodiversity introduces the reader to the extraordinary men and women who created these books. They focused exquisite artistic skills on nature, traded in exotic seashells and butterflies, collected bird and monkey specimens in tropical rainforests, dredged strange invertebrates from the depths of the ocean, peered through magnifying lenses at insects, and dug prehistoric bones out of the earth.
After sinking out of sight in the twentieth century, biodiversity art resurfaced in the twenty-first in myriad forms that reach millions of people on the Internet, as the natural history books in the world’s great libraries were digitized and made available to all.
Chronicling the only art movement that successfully aligned the goals of art and science, for the transcendent purpose of documenting and understanding the natural world, The Art of Biodiversity is a must-have for historians of science, collectors of botanical and zoological art, and anyone captivated by the enduring beauty of the living world.
“Dazzling . . . A natural history page-turner.”―KIRKUS
“The art and design of natural science is brought to the forefront in Eric Himmel’s elegantly written, illustrated, and designed The Art of Biodiversity.”―PRINT
“To turn each page is to be transported. Eric Himmel does something strange and wonderful, alchemizing image and insight into a supremely vivid guided tour of the art of nature, and the nature of art. A book as beautiful as it is fascinating.”―JASON ROBERTS, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Every Living Thing and A Sense of the World
Over a 40-year publishing career at Abrams, Eric Himmel acquired and edited hundreds of books in the arts and sciences. He was a coauthor of The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2017). The son of photographers Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel, Eric is an author and sculptor living in New York City.
Created by award-winning illustrator Elise Hurst, this captivating wordless picture book features 50 richly detailed illustrations to explore. There are imaginative places to visit, mythological creatures to meet, and amazing adventures waiting for you. But the story of these illustrations is yours to create.
As a child living in exile during the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei often found himself with nothing to read but government-approved comic books. Although they were restricted by the confines of political propaganda, Ai Weiwei was struck by the artists’ ability to express their thoughts on art and humanity through graphic storytelling. Now, decades later, Ai Weiwei and Italian comic artist Gianluca Costantini present ZODIAC, Ai Weiwei’s first graphic memoir.
From Bill Griffith, creator of 
In the Victorian language of flowers, hundreds of blooms were ascribed specific meanings based on mythology, science, foreign language, and ancient history. Page through this botanical encyclopedia to learn each flower’s Victorian meaning (blackberry, for example, represents « envy » while ranunculus boldly states, « I am dazzled by your charms »), other common names for the bloom, and read about each flower’s cultural history. There is also an index of the flowers grouped by theme, should you want to challenge your local florist with creating a coded message for a loved one.