Nehemiah Grew, the illustrator

Abstract

The literature on seventeenth-century Royal Society member Nehemiah Grew's artistic production has been sparse and tentative. Although his publication record includes five illustrated books, some of which feature quite elaborate illustrative programmes, it has been challenging to credit any of this visual production directly to the books’ author. In this article, I aim to both contribute to the growing interest in Grew's illustrations, and to provide a corrective to this gap in the literature, presenting Grew for the first time as an active illustrator and arguing for the importance of Grew's visual production during his career with the Royal Society. I will discuss his visual archive and his relationship with his engravers and will also present evidence of his regular use of illustrated figures in lectures he presented throughout the 1670s. This includes attributing two original drawings to Grew that are still present in the Royal Society's collections—two dissected cat's kidneys—that are associated with a lecture he gave on animal anatomy in 1679.