Chamaecrista kunthiana — Herbarium Specimen, Vera Cruz
· Collected 1730, det. 1880s–1900s
This is not a cartoon or caricature. It is a pressed-plant herbarium sheet: dried stems of Chamaecrista kunthiana (a leguminous subshrub), mounted on buff paper with multiple annotation labels accrued across roughly two centuries. The Natural History Museum, London barcode and color-calibration strip at left are modern digitization tools. Handwritten notes record the Vera Cruz locality, a collector's field number, and successive botanical determinations — the layered script itself a document of taxonomic revision. No satirical tradition applies here. Describing it as political printmaking would be false. The specimen belongs to the history of natural-history illustration and Linnaean collecting practice, not to Hogarth, Gillray, or Daumier.
About this artifact
- Date
- Collected 1730, det. 1880s–1900s
- Rights
- Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
- Restoration
- Digitally restored and hosted by ComicBooks.com.
Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.