Program Direction

On one level, The Curious Mister Catesby examines Catesby as an important artist, whose paintings, etchings and writings are lasting works of art, providing us with an invaluable look at and understanding of the rich and varied habitat of pre-revolutionary America. Certainly, there were European contemporaries of Catesby’s whose illustrated natural histories helped advance the art of their predecessors: Maria Sybilla Meriam, a trained artist, became known for her works on the complete life cycles of butterflies; Eleazar Albin, a professional artist, wrote a natural history of birds and illustrated it with hand-colored copperplate engravings; and George Edwards, a friend of Catesby’s, produced a natural history of uncommon birds with copperplate etchings. Most of these authors and artists, however, had never seen their subjects alive in their native habit; they did not know postures, behaviors, preferred foods or nesting sites. Their illustrations tended to be static (dead specimens posed upright with generic backgrounds). Catesby broke this pattern, sketching first-hand observations in the field.

On a second level, the film underscores Catesby’s contributions as a scientist and naturalist – contributions that made him a pioneering figure in the exploration of the New World, influencing such notables of the Enlightenment as Carl Linnaeus, the inventor of the binomial biological classification system.

Finally, on a third level, the film views Catesby as a conservationist, probably the first to recognize how a disregard for the quality of habitat can negatively impact the survival of a species, a disregard that has caused the disappearance of several of the birds that Catesby captured on paper more that 275 years ago. Today, his art reminds us of how incalculably precious and fragile our natural habitat is.

In preparation for developing the film treatment and script that embraced these interwoven subjects, considerable research was done on Catesby’s life and on pertinent documents pertaining to his art. David Elliott, executive director of the CCT and the film’s executive producer, studied essentially all written materials on the artist/naturalist, examining original correspondence at the Royal Society and the Linnaean Society in London, as well as all of Alecto Historical Editions’ facsimiles of Catesby’s original watercolors. He reviewed first editions of Catesby’s Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, the Natural History Museum in London, the Charleston Museum and at Middleton Place Plantation.

Several experts on Catesby and his art, his contributions to the natural sciences, and the times in which he lived and worked, have generously provided valuable assistance in the production of The Curious Mr Catesby. These include Alan Feduccia, S. K. Heninger Professor of Biology and Geology, University of North Carolina, who has written extensively on the birds of Colonial America; David Gordon, PhD, Manager, Coastal Programs, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services, who has extensive knowledge of the South Carolina Lowcountry’s topography and geography; Christopher Humphries, Professor of Bio-Geography, Department of Botany, London Natural History Museum; Suzanne Linder, PhD, an historian, whose major focus of study is colonial South Carolina; Amy Meyers, Director, Yale Collection of British Art, Yale University, a leading authority on Catesby’s paintings;  Leslie Overstreet, MLS, Curator, Natural-History Rare Books, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, an expert in the printing and publishing of 18th century wildlife art and Henrietta McBurney Ryan, formerly Deputy Keeper of the Print Room at Windsor Castle and internationally recognized Catesby authority.