The Marginalian
The Marginalian

French Artist Paul Sougy’s Stunning Mid-Century Scientific Illustrations of Plants, Animals, and the Human Body

On a recent visit with a friend and her newborn daughter, I was completely taken with an enormous scientific diagram of a snail hanging by the crib, aglow with the thrill of science and the unmistakable vibrancy of mid-century graphic design. I asked about it — she said it was a vintage French classroom poster she had acquired at the Oakland Flea Market. Determined to find out more about its creator, I had only the tiny inscription in the bottom right-hand corner to go on: “P. Sougy, 1955.”

Paul Sougy: The Snail. Available as a print and face mask.

This is what I discovered after weeks of trawling catalogs, libraries, antiquarian bookstores, and French government archives: In the 1940s, Paul Sougy — a curator of natural history at the science museum of the French city of Orléans, and a gifted artist — was commissioned by the estate of the pioneering 18th-century French naturalist and anatomist Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux to create a series of illustrations based on Auzoux’s work, to be used in textbooks, workbooks, transparencies, and large-scale educational charts for classroom walls.

French schoolchildren in science class, early 1900s (Musée national de l’Éducation)

Over the next two decades, Sougy proceeded to draw some uncommonly beautiful and distinctive diagrams of the natural world: bats and butterflies and sea urchins; pines and ferns and peas; the human brain and heart and respiratory system; the fly, Willam Blake’s existential muse; the horse, that emancipator of human love; moss, that subtle teacher in the art of seeing.

Today, all that is remembered of Sougy is the tiny 270-meter street in Orléans named for him, as his gorgeous drawings — his life’s work — perish out of print, to be chanced upon by young twenty-first-century mothers at flea markets.

Having culled as many of these gems as I could find from various government repositories, vintage textbooks, and classroom posters — crinkled and worn, savaged by time and schoolchildren’s eager hands — I have endeavored to restore them and make them available as prints for the scientific edification and aesthetic delight of generations to come, with a portion of all proceeds going toward The Nature Conservancy in support of their noble, necessary work to preserve the living splendor and biodiversity of this irreplaceable planet.

Paul Sougy: The Bat. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Lizard. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Butterfly. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Cat. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Frog. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Cuttlefish. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: Coral. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Mole. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Horse. Available as a print and face mask.
Paul Sougy: The Cow. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Pig. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Ape. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Rabbit. Available as a print and face mask.
Paul Sougy: The Pigeon. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Perch. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Mussel. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Hydra. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Crayfish. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Spider. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Beetle. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Bee. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Fly. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Cicada. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Grasshopper. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Human Heart. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Human Eye. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Human Digestive System. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Human Human Lung. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Human Skin. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Human Skull. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: Human Nerves. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: Moss. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Fern. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Buttercup. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Pine. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: Pollen. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Bean. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Pea. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: Wheat. Available as a print.
Paul Sougy: The Sea Urchin. Available as a print.

Complement with the gorgeous natural history paintings of the trailblazing 18th-century artist Sarah Stone, then revisit Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter’s stunning paintings of mushrooms, which revolutionized mycology and still help scientists identify species.

Special thanks to the archives of the University of Artois


Published November 29, 2019

https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/29/paul-sougy/

BP

www.themarginalian.org

BP

PRINT ARTICLE

Filed Under

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)