<darwin>

This portrait was created to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Even without his ground-breaking research on evolution, Darwin would have been a genius by any measure...an expert in so many areas of nature ranging from birds and mammals, to plants, fauna, corals and fungi. He was an exceptionally keen and intense observer and documentor, as well as being very humble and modest. Embodied within this portrait is the final concluding paragraph of his seminal work “On the Origin of Species”:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Look carefully and you’ll also find his hand-written notes, an illustration of the variety of species, the schematic of the ship H.M.S. Beagle on which he made his historic research trip, a map of his journey, and more...

To order a fine art print of my portrait of Darwin (with the title and years, as shown above), please see the Print Order Form.

On the left you see Peggy Gyulai, Keith and Linda Thomson (check out Keith's book “The Young Charles Darwin”) at the Oxford University Society meeting held in the residence of the British Consulate General for San Francisco, Julian Evans.On the right you see the framed painting.

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