Scientist of the Day - Sarah Landry
Blue wildebeest, pen and ink drawing by Sarah Landry, detail of offprint from Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by E.O. Wilson, fig. 24-3, pp. 492-3, 1975 (Dava Sobel)
Sarah B. Landry, an illustrator of the natural world, was born June 15, 1942. Last year, I wrote a post on E. O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist who published books on ants, insect societies, and, controversially, on sociobiology. Wilson's books are beautifully illustrated, especially Sociobiology: A New Synthesis (1975), which has quite a few pen-and-ink drawings, sometimes in two-page spreads that are wonderfully composed and rendered.
Portrait of a young Sarah Landry, undated photograph (courtesy of Joe Landry)
I mentioned in the captions for that post that the pen-and-ink illustrations were drawn by Sarah Landry. I didn't know anything about Sarah at the time, and still don't know much, but I have decided that she deserves notice in her own right. If all I can do is show some more of her artwork, that might be tribute enough.
Blue wildebeest, pen-and-ink drawing by Sarah Landry, offprint from Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by E.O. Wilson, fig. 24-3, pp. 492-3, 1975 (Dava Sobel)
Pen-and-ink drawings are tricky. They lack color, which for many people is a drawback, but in the hands of a master, like Mrs. Landry, a fine-tipped pencil or pen can capture an incredible amount of detail, right down to individual hairs and plumelets. And the drawing can be arranged, especially if it is a panorama, to show animals, birds, or insects interacting in every way possible, something a single photograph can never capture. That is certainly true of the lemur groupings that I showed in the Wilson post (and here in detail, our fifth image), and it is equally true of the Blue Wildebeest panorama (first and third image), and the Kangaroo panorama (fourth image) shown here
Kangaroos, pen-and-ink drawing by Sarah Landry, offprint from Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by E.O. Wilson, fig. 23-2, pp. 470-71, 1975 (Dava Sobel)
In the late 1970s, Sarah Landry met a young Dava Sobel at Harvard, and the two thought about publishing a coloring book featuring animals in their natural habitats. Nothing came of the project, but they exchanged some letters and prints, and when Dava heard I was thinking of featuring Sarah in a post, she sent me the correspondence, and included offprints of four of Sarah's drawings for Wilson's Sociobiology. I thought I would show two of them here, since they must be scarce in this state, and they are unmarred by a center-fold, which is always nice for a panorama.
Lemurs, pen-and-ink drawing by Sarah Landry, detail of fig. 26-3, in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by E.O. Wilson, pp. 532-3, 1975 (Linda Hall Library)
I also found, on the used book market, an unheralded book, Gadabouts and Stick-at-Homes: Wild Animals and their Habitats, by Lorus and Margery Milne (Sierra Club, 1980), with illustrations by Mrs. Landry. The drawings are almost 100% stipple, and they are lovely, especially one showing Arctic terns (last image), which demonstrates Sarah’s fondness for depicting extreme foreground and background subjects in the same frame, something we also see in her panoramas for Wilson’s Sociobiology. Sarah illustrated many other books, from which I might show examples on another occasion. But I would like to conclude with a quotation from E. O. Wilson’s autobiography, Naturalist (1994), where he commented (p. 324) on his association with Mrs. Landry:
“Sarah Landry, then as now one of America's best wildlife illustrators, was miraculously available in the early part of her career as I started work on my big books. She depicted animal societies with composites of animals in behavioral acts that could never be brought together in a single photograph. With a passion for accuracy, she went beyond the effort required for an ordinary book on animal behavior, traveling to zoos and aquaria to sketch captive animals and visiting herbaria to render in detail the plant species found in the natural habitats of the animal societies. To Sarah, the bushes among which a mountain gorilla foraged meant as much as the gorilla itself."
Arctic Terns, pen-and-ink stipple drawing by Sarah Landry, in Gadabouts and Stick-at-Homes: Wild Animals and their Habitats, by Lorus and Margery Milne, p. 22, 1980 (author’s copy)
Sarah died in 2020, but her husband Joe, after my post on E.O. Wilson, sent me her birth and death dates, enabling me to write this birthday notice. Perhaps during the next year, I can gather further biographical information about Sarah and the course of her career, and write a follow-up post, with more drawings. Mr. Landry does maintain a website in Sarah's honor, which shows all of her book illustrations and other drawings and artwork, beautifully reproduced. You may find it at this link.
Scientific illustrators never get enough credit. Up until the 20th century, they often received no credit at all, and tributes like Wilson’s for Mrs. Landry are seldom seen in Victorian times, as Heny Vandyke Carter found out (see our post just last week on Gray’s Anatomy). We are doing our best in this series to restore a credit balance to those who illustrate the world of scientific endeavor. If you have a favorite whom I have never profiled, please let me know.
William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
