portrait of a scientist

Portrait of Rosa Smith Eigenmann from Eigenmann  mss. 

Last semester, I came across Rosa Smith Eigenmann's name when doing some preliminary research for another topic for another class. Our discussion about Maria Audubon last week (particularly about women in the academy) reminded me that I had been meaning to track her down at the Lilly. I was lucky to discover that the Eigenmann mss. has many rich and beautiful handwritten letters written to and from Rosa and her close and extended family, and I’m hoping to do more with the collection as the semester progresses. In the meantime, Prof. Irmscher thought it would be neat to share this stunning portrait with the class.

Abbreviated background information:

First, Rosa is regarded as the “first female ichthyologist of any accomplishments” (her Wikipedia entry also lists her as the “first notable female ichthyologist”). She spent most of her youth in California near San Diego, and then moved to Bloomington to study at Indiana at the request of David Starr Jordan, first president of Stanford but who was teaching at Indiana at the time. Rosa published several scientific articles and discovered at least one new species of fish before she married her husband Carl (also a student of ichthyology at Indiana and a famous alumnus as well). Rosa and Carl also collaborated on several articles. Following the birth of their five children, Rosa “retired from active research,” instead “continuing as the editor of her husband’s manuscripts rather than as his collaborator.”

On to the portrait, which to me reads like an intersection of Victorian ghost & post-mortem photography and old and new portraits of scientists with their specimen.

There are at least two “editions” of this photograph in the Eigenmann mss. The one included here is larger but also cropped, so that we see less of the interior of the room. My guess is that it was taken in the early to mid-1940s (she looks quite old and died in 1947), possibly by her daughter Thora. What strikes me first are Rosa’s cataracts (her left eye is almost completely clouded over) and the similarly white and foggy portrait (or x-ray) of the fish she holds in her left hand, presumably near her right knee, or lap, as others would hold a kitten, perhaps. Rosa’s wrinkly skin, cataracts, and fish silhouette share the same ghostliness, while her knitted sweater and the upholstered curtains weigh down the portrait.

Obviously, this would be a completely different photograph if the fish wasn’t there. In a sense, Rosa was her fish. Her life—the people and places that mark her biographies—was contoured by her study of them; fish led her to Carl, and her marriage to him in effect ended her participation in field research. Prof. Irmscher notes that other portraits of scientists include the actual specimen, not “just" a photo or some other representation of them. In Rosa’s portrait, there seems to be a parallel between the fish “by proxy” that she holds and her later role as Carl’s “editor” (instead of “collaborator”): reading and editing scientific data about the fish is not the same as pursuing the fish in real-time. In the morbid Victorian sense, the inclusion of the fish-by-proxy might be a way of visually preserving the “Specimen”—and her career in ichthyology—for future generations while implicitly functioning as a mirror of both her own and her viewers’ own mortality (a la memento mori). Finally, I think it’s poetic that the species of fish that she discovered in her youth was the blind (!) goby (and that she endured several surgeries in old age to fix her failing eyesight before dying of heart disease.)

There’s a lot more to say about the photograph, but I think I’ll leave it there. 

Blind Goby from Science Photo Library