Hummingbirds – Trochilidae Plate 99 – Ernst Haeckel
Hummingbirds – Trochilidae – Plate 99 – Kunstformen der Natur Poster
Hummingbirds is a beautifully restored Vintage nature illustration by Ernst Haeckel.
Hummingbirds belong to the avian family Trochilidae and their closest relatives are the equally fascinating swifts. Hummingbirds are small (2-20 grams), with long narrow bills, and small saber-like wings.
Males (and occasionally females) often have a colorful gorget (see sidebar): small, stiff, highly reflective, colored feathers on the throat and upper chest. These shiny feathers and others around the head may look sooty black until a hummer turns its head to catch the sun and display the intense metallic spectral color.
About the illustration and Ernst Haeckel
The hummingbirds is also known as Trochilidae Plate 99 from the book Kunstformen der Natur (German for Art Forms of Nature). Kunstformen der Natur is a book of lithographic and autotype prints by German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Originally published in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904 and as a complete volume in 1904, it consists of 100 prints of various organisms, many of which were first described by Haeckel himself.
About Kunstformen der Natur
The over-riding themes of the Kunstformen plates are symmetry and organization. The subjects were selected to embody organization, from the scale patterns of boxfishes to the spirals of ammonites to the perfect symmetries of jellies and microorganisms, while images composing each plate are arranged for maximum visual impact. Kunstformen der Natur was influential in early 20th-century art, architecture, and design, bridging the gap between science and art. In particular, many artists associated with Art Nouveau were influenced by Haeckel’s images, including René Binet, Karl Blossfeldt, Hans Christiansen, and Émile Gallé. One prominent example is the Amsterdam Commodities Exchange designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage, which was in part inspired by Kunstformen illustrations.
About Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834 – 1919) was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin’s work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”) claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species’ evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
