Vanessa Steenbergen-Titchmarsh fellowship Allard Pierson Artis Library

The Allard Pierson’s magnificent natural history collection can be viewed in the Allard Pierson Artis Library and is available for research there. Its origins lie in the Natura Artis Magistra society that was established in 1838 and is known to most people as Artis Zoo. The society found itself in financial difficulties at the end of the 1930s. The city of Amsterdam took on the debts of Artis in 1939 but retained many of the collections in return. These assets, including the building in which the Artis Library was housed, were transferred over the years to the University of Amsterdam, at that time still called the Municipal University. After being housed temporarily in the Biology Faculty, the collection was transferred in 2005 to the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam and has since 2019 been an Allard Pierson collection.

The books previously in the possession of the Natura Artis Magistra society now form the core of the Allard Pierson’s natural history collection, today comprising more than 100,000 items from the 16th to the 20th century.
The old collections of the Amsterdam Hortus Botanicus (Botanical Garden) also form part of the University of Amsterdam’s rich natural history collection. The collection thus covers all the fields of natural history: zoology, botany, geology and palaeontology. Modern themes like ecology and nature conservation have now been added.

The Artis Library contains old and rare printed works, manuscripts, watercolours, drawings and prints covering the entire course of natural history. The collections contain outstanding items, such as albums with watercolours of animals that were intended as examples for the works of Conrad Gessner (1516-1565); the hand-coloured books of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) on the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; the Moninckx Atlas with 425 water colours of plants in the Amsterdam hortus, drawn between 1687 and 1750; the bird books of John Gould (1804-1881); letters from Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and a collection of approximately 60,000 illustrations of animals dated between 1500 and 1900: the Iconographia Zoologica

The collection is used for teaching, research and presentation purposes to the wider public through exhibitions, symposia and publications and other means. The Artis Library, which may be visited by appointment only, currently draws around 2,500 visitors every year. Many of its works are available digitally and so are accessible to the entire world, irrespective of time or place.

Suggestions for research

• the role of natural history sources in the light of the climate problems of today;
• the number of female researchers, artists and printmakers in natural history publications;
• extinct or endangered plants and animals in the Artis Library collection;
• the composition of the Iconographia Zoologica;
• the relationship between text and illustration in natural history publications;
• or other topics in the field of natural history

Searching in the collection

The Allard Pierson collections can be accessed and searched via a number of databases and online catalogues. The collection of the Artis Library has been catalogued in its entirety and can be browsed via the online catalogue of the UvA. When searching, you can apply filters on the right side of the search engine: for ‘Library’ choose ‘Artis Bibliotheek’, to find solely books that are physically being held at the Artis Library. A part of the natural history collections resides at the Allard Pierson: they can be found in the same catalogue. Some of our highlights have been digitized in the Allard Pierson’s beeldbank. The Iconographia Zoologica can be searched in its entirety on Wikimedia Commons. The archives of both the Allard Pierson and the Artis Bibliotheek can be found in ArchivesSpace.

Questions

Myriam van der Hoek (m.vanderhoek@uva.nl), collection specialist of the Allard Pierson will answer questions regarding the Artis Library collection, and questions on procedure can be put to Laurien de Gelder (l.i.degelder@uva.nl).

Guidelines

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