Nature’s Explorers celebrates the individuals who made great personal endeavours to document the natural world. Superb artworks and photographs spanning three centuries have been chosen to illustrate each essay.

From ground-breaking theorists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to evocative artists like Ferdinand Bauer and John James Audubon, these explorers shared an ambition to illuminate new worlds and each embodied the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

It was not until the early eighteenth century that artists were included on such expeditions, they were called upon to illustrate the new flora and fauna they discovered and in doing so were also able to provide new insights from social, cultural and historical perspectives.