William Bartram (108)

Elected to the American Society.

William Bartram (9 April 1739–22 July 1823) was a planter, botanist, and illustrator, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born outside Philadelphia to founding member John Bartram, William had by nineteen published naturalist sketches in Britain. Despite efforts his father’s urging into medicine or commerce, William’s dab hand and early success at naturalist illustration, combined with a 1765 tour of Florida with his father, rendered the young man a lover of the natural world. Despite his father’s pleas to take up profitable employ, William gathered around him a few patrons and set out on a four year adventure through the southern colonies in 1773. Putting his journals into form took the better part of a decade; during the same he planted a well-visited experimental garden concerned more with uniquity than beauty. His 1791 publication was a pathbreaking work of exploration and naturalism, blurring poetic romanticism, breathless travelogue, and scientific observations, all finely illustrated. It was his magnum opus: excepting his illustrating the majority of plates for fellow APS member Benjamin Smith Barton’s Elements of Botany (1803), Bartram produced only a few short works of observation and otherwise retired to his garden for his final decades. He died a man of little wealth in 1823. Brother Moses Bartram and half-brother Isaac Bartram were both APS members. (PI)