Before photographs, these amazing illustrations showed us what deep space looks like
Meet Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, the French dilettante artist who gave us Jupiter
In the 19th century, science was still an amateur’s game. Any well-heeled gentleman with enough ambition—or obsession—could fixate on a field and, in some cases, pioneer new knowledge.
Étienne Léopold Trouvelot wanted to be an entomologist. So much so, when he decamped to Massachusetts from Louis-Napoléon’s France in 1852, he took with him a cache of Lymantria dispar dispa, commonly known as the Gypsy Moth. Trouvelot had been scheming on a way to produce silk using the moth’s larvae. Unfortunately, the insects escaped, triggering an infestation which proved impossible to manage. To this day the plague of white moths continues to wreck havoc on northeastern verdancy to the tune of $868 million annually. Call it a war on trees.
But after the episode with his moths, Trouvelot lost interest in bugs and decided to fall back on his former experience as a part-time astronomer and artist. His illustrations landed him a job at the Harvard observatory, and later a stint at the U.S. Naval Observatory where he was allowed access to state-of-the-art refracting telescopes. Trouvelot was especially drawn to the sun, its protuberances and the “veiled” sunspots he discovered in 1875. Today his name is attached to separate craters on both the Moon and Mars.
Trouvelot produced thousands of beautifully impressionistic images over his career. His cosmic interpretations came from direct observation, but they also allowed viewers access to a mostly invisible world at a time when people relied on illustrations to show them what they couldn’t see. Today’s photographic equivalents are no less impressive, but they’ve lost some of the artistry—and authorship—which imbued these fantastical early representations with an ineffable mystery and adventure.
Illustrations courtesy The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings (C. Scribner’s Sons) via the New York Public Library.
