In 1886, the US Government Commissioned 7,500 Watercolor Paintings of Every Known Fruit in the World: Download Them in High Resolution

T.S. Eliot asks in the open­ing stan­zas of his Cho­rus­es from the Rock, “where is the knowl­edge we have lost in infor­ma­tion?” The pas­sage has been called a point­ed ques­tion for our time, in which we seem to have lost the abil­i­ty to learn, to make mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions and con­tex­tu­al­ize events. They fly by us at super­hu­man speeds; cred­i­ble sources are buried between spu­ri­ous links. Truth and false­hood blur beyond dis­tinc­tion.

But there is anoth­er fea­ture of the 21st cen­tu­ry too-often unre­marked upon, one only made pos­si­ble by the rapid spread of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy. Vast dig­i­tal archives of pri­ma­ry sources open up to ordi­nary users, archives once only avail­able to his­to­ri­ans, promis­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty, at least, of a far more egal­i­tar­i­an spread of both infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge.

Those archives include the USDA Pomo­log­i­cal Water­col­or Col­lec­tion, “over 7,500 paint­ings, draw­ings, and wax mod­els com­mis­sioned by the USDA between 1886 and 1942,” notes Chloe Ole­witz at Morsel. The word “pomol­o­gy,” “the sci­ence and prac­tice of grow­ing fruit,” first appeared in 1818, and the degree to which peo­ple depend­ed on fruit trees and fruit stores made it a dis­tinc­tive­ly pop­u­lar sci­ence, as was so much agri­cul­ture at the time.

But pomol­o­gy was grow­ing from a domes­tic sci­ence into an indus­tri­al one, adopt­ed by “farm­ers across the Unit­ed States,” writes Ole­witz, who “worked with the USDA to set up orchards to serve emerg­ing mar­kets” as “the country’s most pro­lif­ic fruit-pro­duc­ing regions began to take shape.” Cen­tral to the gov­ern­ment agency’s grow­ing pomo­log­i­cal agen­da was the record­ing of all the var­i­ous types of fruit being cul­ti­vat­ed, hybridized, inspect­ed, and sold from both inside the U.S. and all over the world.

Pri­or to and even long after pho­tog­ra­phy could do the job, that meant employ­ing the tal­ents of around 65 Amer­i­can artists to “doc­u­ment the thou­sands and thou­sands of vari­eties of heir­loom and exper­i­men­tal fruit cul­ti­vars sprout­ing up nation­wide.” The USDA made the full col­lec­tion pub­lic after Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion activist Park­er Hig­gins sub­mit­ted a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request in 2015.

Hig­gins saw the project as an exam­ple of “the way free speech issues inter­sect with ques­tions of copy­right and pub­lic domain,” as he put it. His­tor­i­cal gov­ern­ment-issued fruit water­col­ors might not seem like the obvi­ous place to start, but they’re as good a place as any. He stum­bled on the col­lec­tion while either ran­dom­ly col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion or acquir­ing knowl­edge, depend­ing on how you look at it, “chal­leng­ing him­self to dis­cov­er one new cool pub­lic domain thing every day for a month.”

It turned out that access to the USDA images was lim­it­ed, “with high res­o­lu­tion ver­sions hid­den behind a large­ly untouched pay­wall.” After invest­ing $300,000, they had made $600 in fees in five years, a los­ing propo­si­tion that would bet­ter serve the pub­lic, the schol­ar­ly com­mu­ni­ty, and those work­ing in-between if it became freely avail­able.

You can explore the entire­ty of this tan­ta­liz­ing col­lec­tion of fruit water­col­ors, rang­ing in qual­i­ty from the work­man­like to the near sub­lime, and from unsung artists like James Mar­i­on Shull, who sketched the Cuban pineap­ple above, Ellen Isham Schutt, who brings us the Aegle marme­los, com­mon­ly called “bael” in India, fur­ther up, and Deb­o­rah Griscom Pass­more, whose 1899 Malus domes­ti­cus, at the top, describes a U.S. pomo­log­i­cal arche­type.

It’s easy to see how Hig­gins could become engrossed in this col­lec­tion. Its util­i­tar­i­an pur­pose belies its sim­ple beau­ty, and with 3,800 images of apples alone, one could get lost tak­ing in the visu­al nuances—according to some very pro­lif­ic nat­u­ral­ist artists—of just one fruit alone. Hig­gins, of course, cre­at­ed a Twit­ter bot to send out ran­dom images from the archive, an inter­est­ing dis­trac­tion and also, for peo­ple inclined to seek it out, a lure to the full USDA Pomo­log­i­cal Water­col­or Col­lec­tion.

At what point does an explo­ration of these images tip from infor­ma­tion into knowl­edge? It’s hard to say, but it’s unlike­ly we would pur­sue either one if that pur­suit didn’t also include its share of plea­sure. Enter the USDA’s Pomo­log­i­cal Water­col­or Col­lec­tion here to new and down­load over 7,500 high-res­o­lu­tion dig­i­tal images like those above.

via Morsel.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Archive Dig­i­tizes 80,000 His­toric Water­col­or Paint­ings, the Medi­um Through Which We Doc­u­ment­ed the World Before Pho­tog­ra­phy

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness