Drawing from life: the Scott sisters

Says Dr Vanessa Finney, who manages the country’s oldest and largest natural history archives and collections at the Australian Museum. 

Our first public museum, established 1827 in Sydney, the Australian Museum had the aim of acquiring rare, strange, important and educational specimens of natural history. And despite fierce competition from millions of objects spanning millions of years - like an opalised plesiosaurus, a 2.5 metre sunfish, or a glass-plate photo of a puggle in an eggcup – the work of the Scott sisters is a favourite, with an exhibition in 2017.

The sisters Harriet Morgan (1830 – 1907) and Helena Forde (1832 – 1910), nee Scott, produced meticulous scientific artworks of Australian flora and fauna. The best of their work showcases lepidoptera: moths and butterflies, plus caterpillar forms and favourite foods. These illustrations were for a book by their father, Australian Lepidoptera and their Transformations, the production of which took decades and was partly to blame for the family’s bankruptcy. This led the sisters to turn to their art for income, eventually selling their collections to the Australian Museum.

The collection is as informative as it is beautiful – not just as an accurate scientific representation of animals, but what it paints about society. 

Image: A page from Lepidoptera. Credit: Australian Museum

It is also a story of class, colonisation and capitalism – all represented in the finely illustrated veins of a leaf, or the wings of a butterfly.

Scientific illustration still has a place today, with Universities offering courses and institutions like the Botanic Gardens of Sydney or the Garvan Institute of Medical Research having illustrators on hand. Detailed illustrations were and still are the best way to clearly record a specimen and share it with others. Think of science textbooks, medical diagrams, fish identification posters or spider charts – all requiring a precise and detail-orientated artist to produce.

In some instances, the original specimen that dictated an animal’s scientific description and name has been lost, leaving only the illustration as a guide. It’s just one reason the Australian Museum’s rare book collection, that Vanessa manages, is so important even today. 

Harriet and Helena’s work is no different, with their images being iconotypes for 50 Australian moths and butterflies, plus the animals identified by other natural historians such as Gerard Krefft who wrote books on snakes, mammals and fossils in the 1860s. 

Despite an ineligibility to study science based on their gender, the sisters were elected honorary members of the Entomological Society of NSW, and were the primary scientific illustrators in colonial Sydney. 

Images below: A large sunfish about to be hoisted into the Australian Museum; a puggle in an egg cup; Ethel King at work. Credit: Australian Museum

Vanessa has always been interested in the (predominantly) uncredited work done by women that keeps museums operating, such as Ethel King – another illustrator for the Australian Museum, working in the 1920s and 30s.

The women’s art story of the Scott sisters has a bit of a twist. Helena fought for her recognition, writing letters to family friend and curator of the Australian Museum, Edward Ramsey, negotiating the sale of her and her sister’s work plus the family papers. Whereas their father had donated his moth collection to the museum decades prior, Helena knew the paintings, manuscripts and works’ value financially, and as a national collection piece. This ensured that their art and contribution to science was not lost to history.

This also reveals the class and capitalism part of the story. Their parents lived separately for nearly all of the sisters’ childhoods (their grandmother forbidding her son to marry their mother, it seems). Their father was very well-connected, a trustee of the museum, moving in all the right circles of early colonial Sydney and part of modern conversations of science and society. 

Their mother was a seamstress living in the lower classes, an example of a working woman – something rare in the upper crusts but important for a functioning colonial outpost. The sisters’ time in Sydney was defined by this moving between the two worlds, giving them a diverse social and economic background, with a variety of influences, inspiration and ideas. 

The move to an island near Newcastle with their parents enabled them to focus on their scientific and artistic work, capturing insects and studying them in the fine detail they are now famous for. 

After their father’s bankruptcy, the sisters had to push against convention and shame to ask for money for something they’d previously done for free. But there are some interesting results from this - Helena was the artist behind the first Australian-themed Christmas cards in 1879, produced by publishers Turner and Henderson. Harriet also detailed many plant species in the Railway Guide of New South Wales, supporting all passengers’ games of ‘eye spy’ or faunal ‘spotto’ in the late 1800s.

Image: Vanessa Finney. Credit: Australian Museum

In 1884, Helena sold some of her father’s papers to the Australian Museum, and the following year, Edward recommended the Trust purchase the items relating to the Lepidoptera book for 200 pounds (about $40,000 today – thanks RBA calculator).

The final collection from the Scott family, now in the custodianship of the Australian Museum, includes insects, “manuscripts, correspondence, research notes, observational notebooks, photographs, sketches, dried botanical specimens and spectacular watercolour final publication plates, all relating to the research and production of some significant 19th century natural history works.”

The care and attention from the museum for nearly 150 years, plus the dedication in Harriet and Helena’s artworks, keeps their story alive and brings us a lot of beauty, even today. 

Images below: pages from Australian Lepidoptera and their Transformations. Credit: Harriet and Helena Scott, Australian Museum