A mushroom will not wait for its painter. It comes up overnight, rots within days and cannot be dried and pressed like a flower. Over three centuries, that race against decay drew priests, naturalists and illustrators down to the forest floor, and one of them came back with a mushroom that glows in the dark.
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How These Were Chosen
A mushroom is only the visible part of a fungus. The fungus itself lives out of sight, as a mass of fine threads running through soil or dead wood, and sends up its mushrooms for a few days at most.
That short life forced artists to look fast and closely. Naturalists had a further reason, because some deadly kinds look almost exactly like edible ones, and only the gills, the ring or the base of the stem tell them apart.
Each picture here looks at the mushroom for a reason: to name its kind, to show where it grows, to show what people do with it, or to give it a part in a story or a face. A toadstool added only for decoration was left out.
12. James Sowerby, Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms (1795 to 1815)
An egg has been sliced open in the lower left corner of the plate, and inside the white sac a small mushroom is already complete, its gills formed and colored before it has ever broken out. Above it, two tall mushrooms rise from sacs of the same kind on a lump of dark, crumbling matter, and one tips back to show the fan of gills under its split brown cap.
That cut shows what a walk in the woods never reveals. In 1795, in London, James Sowerby began publishing Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms in installments, and this is its first plate. For a naturalist trying to pin down a species, the inside of the egg mattered as much as the outside.
Sowerby called the species Agaricus volvaceus, and he first recorded it in an odd place: indoors. In 1785 it was growing "in great plenty in the bark-beds of hot-houses about London." A bark-bed was a pit filled with tanner's bark and horse manure, which gave off enough heat as it fermented to keep pineapples and other tropical plants warm.
For years the mushroom seemed to belong to those heated pits. In 1794 the Reverend Mr. Relhan, author of a flora of the Cambridge area, found it in a bark-bed at Cambridge, thought it "a great curiosity" and sent Sowerby specimens.
Then it turned up outdoors, first in a lane at Peckham. On August 21, 1795, Sowerby found another in Earl Spencer's park at Wimbledon, growing on "a very rotten stump of a Lime-tree," and four times the size of the one on his plate.
At a Glance
Artist: James Sowerby (English, 1757 to 1822)
Published: Plate 1 of 440, issued in 32 parts from 1795 to 1815
Medium: Hand-colored plate
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Online, in the copy digitized by the Biodiversity Heritage Library from the New York Botanical Garden
11. Ivan Bilibin, Baba Yaga (1900)
An old woman with wild white hair flies through a dark forest, standing in a wooden mortar with a long pestle raised in one hand. Below her, more than twenty red mushrooms with white spots crowd the moss. Yet the tale she comes from does not mention a single mushroom.