The Moth and The Aurora: The Work of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
On the life and the art of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
In the 1860s, the American Civil War cut off the supply of cotton to the textile mills of New England. The solution, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot thought, might be found in moths. With the right kind he could produce silk, and with this he could alleviate the shortage.
Unfortunately, the American moths he tried proved unsuitable. They were susceptible to disease, and none could produce silk fast enough to make commercial sense. But Trouvelot thought he had a solution to this too. A hardier species of moth, he reckoned, could be bred by importing the gypsy moth from his native France.
By 1868, he had acquired some eggs and started rearing them on his farm in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the next year there was a sudden storm, his caterpillars were blown into a nearby woodland, and soon they began to multiply.
Within a few decades of that fateful night, the gypsy moth was everywhere. Today, its caterpillars consume a million acres of foliage every year and cost the economy about a billion dollars annually in lost timber. Efforts at eradicating them have mostly proved unsuccessful.
Trouvelot abandoned his silk farming efforts some time after that disaster. Instead he turned his mind towards art and astronomy. At first, it seems to have been a hobby: he sketched the aurora and a meteor shower. But eventually his work was seen by astronomers at Harvard, and they invited him to make use of their great telescopes.
This was a time before photography was widespread. Early efforts at photographing the stars in the 1840s had used daguerreotypes, but they had proved unsuitable for anything but the brightest objects. By the 1880s, astronomers had photographed the Moon and the Sun and precious little else.
Recording observations was thus mostly done by hand, and this was the art at which Trouvelot excelled. He made over seven thousand astronomical sketches. He drew stars and nebulae, the planets, the rings of Saturn, and the appearance, in 1881, of a comet.
In 1876, some of his sketches were displayed in Philadelphia as part of America’s Centennial celebrations. After this, he set to work preparing a book of his work, and though he had returned to Paris before it was in print, this book - The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual - was published in 1882. The drawings below are taken from that work, and were made in pastel.