Review: Images of Nature

The Scottish naturalist William MacGillivray painted the golden eagle as if it were a great wartime leader. In a watercolour on show at the Images of Nature exhibition, MacGillivray depicts a golden eagle triumphant as it stands atop a rabbit, keeping its head up while digging its talons into the mammal’s back.

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MacGillivray’s golden eagle looks like King Charles I in Anthony van Dyck’s 1636 portrait of the monarch: regal, upright, and fatally blind to the persecution that laid in waiting.

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The Natural History Museum does nod toward the plight of the golden eagle, writing that the bird is now “fiercely protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act”. But their exhibition does not mention that the last golden eagle in England went missing in 2016 and is believed to be dead. Nor does it note that illegal shooting has led to the golden eagle being absent from most of the areas it once occupied, despite the number of golden eagle breeding pairs rising.

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These facts may have been difficult to squeeze onto a patch of museum wall, but without them a visitor cannot grasp the tragic story of the golden eagle – just as one could not get a full picture of King Charles I without knowledge of his execution and the English Civil War that led to it.

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That is not to say Images of Nature, a gallery of 100 paintings and pictures of British wildlife, misses the scale of British wildlife decline entirely. While detailing the great diversity of wildlife in Britain (some 71,000 documented species, according to the exhibition) it emphasises the key finding from the 2016 State of Nature report that more than half of British wildlife species declined between 1970 and 2013.

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The Natural History Museum is not shy about listing climate change and pollution as the chief culprits of that decline, alongside habitat loss - another symptom of climate change and government disregard for green spaces. The damage caused by invasive species is also recognised with a titbit on the roof rat being ousted by the brown rat with which we are now familiar.

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Yet the Images of Nature exhibition falls flat because it does not stick to the theme of British wildlife decline and man’s role in that devastation. Despite having access to a collection of 50,000 artworks and scientific illustrations, many of the British Isles’ most iconic species are sorely absent from the gallery.

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At the time of writing, the badger, honoured and illustrated in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, does not get a mention, despite being culled by the tens of thousands in the name of curbing bovine tuberculosis. The story of the once common red squirrel, reduced to a population of 140,000 thanks to the invasive North American grey squirrel, is missing. The turtle dove of Christmas carol fame has also been clipped from the display, although it still has a perch on the global list of threatened species.

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The only thing stranger than the Natural History Museum’s decision not to include artwork of those icons of British nature, is what they chose to put in their place. The rhinoceros gets a look in through an oil painting by James Parsons because, when the African beast was brought to London in 1739, it “caused a sensation”. Significant space is also given up to the dodo. Though its position as the poster child for extinction has a not-so-subtle relation to other items in the gallery, the squat bird was never one for the South Downs or the Scottish Highlands.

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Worse still, the Natural History Museum has decided to lend a hefty chunk of one of the gallery’s long walls to the pencilled imitations of the gallery’s guests. Among the cutesy, stick-it-on-the-fridge drawings of children, there are the signed portraits of exotic animals, no doubt sketched by overly competitive dads who have seen the opportunity as a chance to flex their O level in art.

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The inclusions of the rhino, the dodo and the amateur Picasso in what the Natural History Museum describes as an exhibition “celebrating the richness and beauty of nature in the British Isles”, are no less baffling than the gallery as whole.  

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For all its noble intentions, Images of Nature is too confused to deliver upon them. The exhibition is free, but until the Natural History Museum’s curators get a grasp on their theme and archive, there is little reason to spend time on this corridor gallery.

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• Images of Nature is at the Natural History Museum, London until July 2018.