Speaker A
Hello everyone, and welcome to today's Armchair Art Tour with Wendy O'Brien. We're very happy to have this series back for 2021.
Explore the life and work of Wilson 'Snowflake' Bentley, pioneer of snowflake microphotography, in this winter-themed Armchair Art Tour with Wendy O'Brien.
Key Takeaways
- Wilson Bentley was a pioneer in photographing snowflakes, revealing their intricate beauty.
- Wonder at the natural world, especially winter phenomena, has diminished but can be rekindled.
- Bentley's work bridges art and science, showing snowflakes as unique masterpieces.
- Winter and snow inspire both personal memories and artistic exploration.
- Engagement with nature and art can help restore a sense of awe and curiosity.
Summary
- Introduction to the Armchair Art Tour series for 2021, focusing on winter arts.
- Wendy O'Brien presents on Wilson 'Snowflake' Bentley, an early microphotographer of snowflakes.
- Discussion of Bentley's fascination with snowflakes and his pioneering photographic techniques.
- Reading of Mary Oliver's poem 'First Snow' to set a reflective tone on winter and wonder.
- Personal reflections on snow and winter experiences by Wendy and Melanie.
- Exploration of the concept of wonder and its decline in modern times, especially in relation to nature and art.
- Detailed look at Bentley's photographic process and his scientific and artistic contributions.
- Presentation of Bentley's snow crystal images as masterpieces of natural design and beauty.
- Mention of Bentley's legacy, including his publications and the renewed interest in his work.
- Encouragement to engage with the series and upcoming seminars led by Wendy O'Brien.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Armchair Art Tour and Winter Series
- 03:44Reading of Mary Oliver's Poem 'First Snow'
- 07:42Personal Memories and Reflections on Snow
- 11:41The Concept of Wonder and Its Decline
- 15:46Introduction to Wilson Bentley and Snowflake Photography
- 19:51Bentley's Photographic Techniques and Early Work
- 23:56Artistic and Scientific Significance of Snow Crystals
- 29:40Legacy and Continued Interest in Bentley's Work
- 35:00Closing Remarks and Upcoming Seminars
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
My name is Melanie Blake, and I'm the director of Classical Pursuits. I'm here today with Samantha Clark, Marketing Manager at our travel partner Worldwide Quest, and with our presenter Wendy O'Brien, Worldwide Quest leader, Classical Pursuits leader, and as I said in our recent blog post, a true force of nature.
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Those of you who were with Wendy for her Armchair Art Tours last year know what a treat you're in for today. This is our polar edition. So, Wendy, over the next three Thursdays, you will be talking about all things wintry arts.
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Today, we're going to start with Wilson Snowflake Bentley, who from a young age was interested in snowflakes and especially microphotography of, so the photography of very small things, specifically snowflakes.
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I'm sure we're going to see a ton of just incredible pictures. Wendy, I'm really looking forward to it. A few quick notes before we start.
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There are a couple of ways you can interact with us during the presentation. We will have a Q&A session at the end with Wendy, and if you would like to ask a question, you can use the questions feature in your GoToWebinar interface.
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You'll either see the word "Questions" or perhaps a question mark icon, depending on what type of device you're using. Just click on that to expand the field and type in your question.
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You can also make a comment in the chat function. Most of the interfaces will also have a chat function. If you need to adjust your audio, you can click on the word "Audio," or you might also see a headphone or an earpiece icon.
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You can open that and adjust the audio settings to your liking. If you are having any trouble, the best way is to send a question to Samantha in the question field. She'll be here throughout the seminar helping you solve any problems.
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Again, this is the first in a three-part series, so Wendy will be with us for the next two Thursdays. Wendy also leads small group seminars for Classical Pursuits, and they are all sold out right now, but I know she has, except for one,
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our seminar on Ian McEwan's Atonement, a truly—I just love this novel, Wendy. I love this novel so much,
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and if you haven't read it, you should, and you should read it with Wendy. There's still plenty of time to sign up for that. It starts on March 17th, and I know Wendy has a lot of other
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things in the pipeline and will be putting more about that up on our website soon. So again, stick with Wendy for the next two weeks and read Atonement with Wendy starting on March 17th.
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All right, so I will—oh, when do you want me to stay on for another moment and then I'm going to head out until the Q&A?
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I do, because I have a question for you in a few minutes, Melanie, but I wanted to start with—whoops—with reading a poem. I hope you'll all entertain me with this, but I think it'll kind of give a framework for our look today at the
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work of Wilson Bentley and our look over the next few weeks at artists who are fascinated with ice and snow.
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The poem is called "First Snow" by Mary Oliver. The snow began here this morning and all day continued. It's white rhetoric everywhere, calling us back to why, how, what's such beauty, and what meaning. Such an oracular fever flowing past windows and energy it seemed would never, ever settle, less than lovely, and only now
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deep into the night, it's finally ended. The silence is immense, and the heavens still hold a million candles. Nowhere the familiar things: stars, the moon, the darkness we expect and nightly turn from. Trees glitter like castles of ribbons; the broad fields
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smolder with light. A passing creek bed lies heaped with shining hills, and those are questions that have assailed us all day, remain not a single answer has been found. Walking out now into the silence and the light under the
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trees and through the fields, it feels like one.
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I love that poem, and it was part of the inspiration for starting this series with everybody. Hello all, thank you all
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who are coming back for another Armchair Art Tour series, and to do winter no less. And hello everybody who's new. So glad to have you with us.
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Yeah, snow and winter. It might have seemed like kind of a torturous thing to put us all up to, especially
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because who would have known that this great polar vortex is covering North America right now? A dear friend of mine in Texas, who often watches these, mentioned to me this morning or sent me a message and said, "I
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don't think I'll be able to catch on to the internet. We're having such problems given the weather today." She thought it was quite funny.
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Melanie, this is my question for you. Melanie, are you a snow person?
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I love snow. Yeah, yeah. I don't see it as much now living in Oakland,
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but I grew up outside of Philadelphia and lived in New York City for a long time, and you know, I'm a frequent visitor to Toronto when there's not a pandemic, and
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one of my very happiest memories is—I think the winter of 1993 was especially snowy and cold in much of the North Atlantic seaboard in the Northeast, and there was a kind of marshy area behind
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our house, and it snowed so much for so long and was so cold that the entire thing became like an ice rink as far as you could see, and every day we would just go out and spend all day on the ice.
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That remains one of my very happiest childhood memories.
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Well, this is why we're friends, Melanie. You and I are—well, I love the snow too. This is me just a week ago in the middle of
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nowhere on a lake that was frozen, and for me, you know, something like this is my idea of heaven. But Melanie, I hope you know that you and I are weirdos in many regards.
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You know, many people look at something like this and go, "No, just say no. It's white and cold, and did I mention cold and white?" And looking at it, well, they realize or acknowledge why in the Book of Job God talks to Job
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about snow. You know, for many people, winter is hard, and I think this winter in particular has been hard as we approach living with a pandemic for almost a year now. It's kind of an interesting time for me in that regard, being winter and
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the difficulties that we're having with it, because I've always been interested, or in my career I've always been interested in the idea of wonder. You see, once upon a time, individually and collectively, we wondered at the world, and when you're a little
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kid, if you remember all the questions you asked and all the awe that you experienced, you know, we wondered at the world in those two regards. And we also wondered at the world collectively. For a long period of time, wonder was
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the standard that we used to judge natural beauty, scientific achievement, and artistic excellence. But then something happened. Then we sort of stopped using the word. I spent a lot of time kind of looking for it to use, and once we
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hit about 1900 moving forward, there are so rare accounts of this notion of wonder. In fact, looking through, I could find, especially in the late 20th century, the few references I found were in the 1960s and related to
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psychedelic drugs, and I think that's a different notion altogether. Anyways, I got very interested in trying to figure out what happened to us. You know, when did we stop wondering at the world, and did we stop, or did we
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give it other kinds of words? And if we did stop, yeah, how do you get your wonder back? And I have to say those questions have begun to have a new meaning or a new resonance to me during the
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pandemic as it's kind of worn on this winter. As many have been wintering during the winter of our discontent, something is a bit different. I think it's become hard for people to wonder, and so I wanted to think about
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that very specifically and very specifically to the notion of winter, and that's really where the series came.
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adventures in the arctic and i also wanted to think about what we can learn from the little experiences the everyday experiences of of the winter of the stuff that we don't have to travel long and far to find but we have right here and and
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right around us and really that's where my interest came into the works of this man this is wilson bentley um wilson bentley you know what i had to stumble over the words and i'll tell you why because i'm
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so used to describing him as wilson snowflake eventually but but this is before he had the snowflake added to his name this is wilson bentley when he was just wilson bentley he was born in 1865 and he was born
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here in jericho vermont this is his family's home now if you don't know where jericho is it's between lake champlain and mount mansfield it is absolutely stunning stunning country and i have to say right from the very start when he was incredibly young
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um wilson well he loves the natural world you know he would spend all his time outside you know those kids i had one like this and you'd be yelling come in for dinner uh that's what uh wilson was like he had this affinity
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to the natural world and well he started to look at it look at it incredibly carefully already when he was fifteen when he was i interrupt you for twenty second can you please move your cursor off the photo
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oh yeah sorry our eternal nemesis that damn curser uh sorry everybody um but here here's wilson um wilson's um microscope so when he was 15 for his birthday he inherited this old microscope and he started to look at the natural
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world through the microscope and more specifically than that what he got really interested in looking at and what he was really interested in participating in was in looking at snow in looking at snow and it's a good thing because
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jericho is in the snow belt where they have an annual snowfall of about 120 inches yes for those of us who complained when we get an inch or so jericho's right there uh getting about 120 inches each year and you know good thing
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for him that he liked the snow because well as i mentioned they got a lot of it here's a picture of him out i think this is uh might not be his sister it might be his sister-in-law and you notice he's got snow already in
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his hand ready to throw those snowballs uh for him snow was magical it was just magical he said at one time that snow was as beautiful as butterflies or flowers but well he could look at it under his
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microscope but it was hard to capture that experience hard to capture that magic that he saw hard to capture that the words even to explain what it was he saw it was somehow incredibly elusive and well just like a snowflake melts so
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quickly he found that his words and his images that he tried to draw of them well they disappeared so quickly now his attempt to give word and image to snow is part of a long history and a long tradition many people think
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that our first real look at snow uh not just snowflakes but snow crystals the small elements that combine to make a snowflake those are small elements well the first time we hear people starting to talk about and study
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of them goes back to 135 bc it to the honda dynasty the han dynasty i have to put it up here to remember the han dynasty and to the writings of a man named tong ying in his works he says flowers of plants
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and trees are generally five-pointed but those of snow are always six-pointed amazing that you know with his bare eye he was able to record this small but oh so important fact about snow crystals um we see the first
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sort of images of of snow of snow crystals coming here this is oles magnus and in 1555 he created wood cuts uh of snow and what's amazing about these particular wood cuts is that he recognized or was already
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um noticing how different they all were he was noticing the great variety of kinds of snow crystals that resulted from olaus magnuson in 1555 we could trace the history of looking at describing snow crystals to somebody kind of surprising
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surprising to me uh john kepler which many of us might know the name of uh because of his works in astronomy uh johan kepler here in this particular work on uh it was a new year's gift as you can see there
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um offered up in 1610 wrote this work on the sixth corner snowflake um what he was interested in was trying to figure out in this word why six like of all the possible numbers or y6 and we may sit back and go because
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but but kepler had a different kind of mind than that he wanted to kind of figure out to rationally pursue this question about why six why six different um arms or or elements to a snowflake he used a kind of rational scientific
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approach for the very first time to the the study of snowflakes in his words snow crystals as we'll see coming up later and that inspired another really surprising person who was fascinated with snowflakes are you ready yeah how about descartes this is descartes
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work on optics meteorology and geometry and included in his discussion of meteorology he talked about snowflakes and in fact this uh is um from one of his pages where he's looking at snowflakes in some early drawings that he made etchings
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that he made of what snowflakes would look like still very rudimentary though still very you know and it looks like the way i sort of draw still very simplistic in its model it wouldn't be until the development of the microscope
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that the images that we were able to capture of a snow crystal they would change and where we see that first is with robert hook robert hook was one of the people involved in the development of the microscope
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and more specifically why he's so important is he started to put everyday objects under the microscope and to look at them and i can only imagine what that must have been like right to take a snowflake and for the first
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time have it magnified now those early magnifications would be maybe up to six times the size of the uh actual object what he must have seen it must have been totally miraculous what he did here is he would look at the microscope
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and he would look at his snow crystals and then he would try to draw them but he himself recognized he was no great uh great artist and so they were still very rudimentary where we start to get more detailed um
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ideas about the structure and also the incredible beauty of snow crystals is with this guy this is scorsby which many people may know as a one of the great explorers of the north and also one of the whalers of the north in his
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notebooks from the 1920s and i know this is a bit it's hard to see but i wanted to give you some idea of well first off just how he covered the pages but a little bit of some of the drawings
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that he would offer he did these remarkable etchings of snowflakes of snow crystals more specifically he took such great care here's a another image that you can take a look at where you see the detail that he gets into the
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intricacies of the drawings as he tried to understand more about what the snow crystal was like and in many ways lay the groundwork for this person this is james glacier uh one of those people sort of lost to um the history of science
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uh he was the first one of the original co-founders of the royal meteorological society he was involved in a lot of early studies of the weather and early findings early scientific findings concerning wind and rain and anyways here he is
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uh and his book snow crystals where he did these drawings these incredibly intricate detailed drawings of snowflakes and they are sort of remarkable little works of art and little is the right word but i just wanted to have a chance to see
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how beautiful they are here's one that's blown up and what it might have taken to draw this to pay such careful and close attention to an image like this or to create something as beautiful as these images that you
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see on the screen in front of you i wanted to talk a little bit about glacier in advance of talking about wilson bentley because i think glacier we already saw two things that will be important for bentley's study of snow
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crystals that is identifying both the beauty and also the science that's involved in its formation bringing together both art and science with nature and maybe if you think back to me talking about wonder being the standard we used for scientific
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achievement natural beauty and artistic excellence you can see why i'm so drawn to this group of artists artists of uh snow and ice here is a a table that's been made of many of the drawings that glacier did and if you have a
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chance go online and look them up because they are these remarkable little works of art following in the footsteps of glazier we have good old here he is again wilson before snowflake we had wilson bentley and he tried to to
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look through his microscope and capture in his drawings what he saw apparently he had about 400 drawings at one point in time of snow crystals that he had done unfortunately they were all destroyed eventually so we have none of them that i can
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show you now but i can tell you um it's really hard eh to draw a snowflake uh something that he recognized um here's a quote from him he said under the microscope i found that the snow snake snowflakes were
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miracles of beauty beauty should not be that could not be sorry snowflakes were miracles of beauty and it seemed a shame that this beauty could not be seen and appreciated by others every crystal was a masterpiece of design
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and no one design was ever repeated when a snowflake melted the design was lost forever just that much beauty was gone without leaving any record behind i became possessed with a great desire to show people something of this wonder full loveliness an
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ambition to become in some measure it's preserver that's something he wrote about his early love of of snow crystals and the limitations of drawing what he saw under the microscope i have to tell you uh i have a bunch of
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snowflakes i'm not sure if you can see behind me because every year for christmas we add a snowflake to the tree so this love of snowflakes is real and true uh and this year to the tree i i decided
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because i knew i was doing uh this talk to try to draw and make my own snowflake so here it is um i challenge anybody to sit back and to understand what problems these early investigators of the snow crystal were having
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uh try to draw one just as you see it or or tread one embroider one just as you see it it ain't easy uh and and like bentley said in this quote he wanted to be able to share this great
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miracle these masterpieces he found with others and so well when he was 16 this is all happening before he's 16. when he's 16 he reads in a magazine about a camera he reads in a magazine about a very specific camera which would
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allow for photo micrograph mic bro i have a hard time with that word photo micrography uh and uh what it would allow him to do was to hook a camera up to a microscope now one thing about bentley is
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he was obsessed with snow and the study of nature from this really young age and i can just imagine he reads about this in a magazine and he pesters his mother unendingly uh and on the his 17th birthday
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he actually received one of these cameras um at the time it was said that it would have been about the cost of a cow and that farm that we saw was a 10 cow dairy farm so you can imagine how expensive what a
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luxury it was that his family bought for him this camera now here's a picture with him of him much later but i like it because you get a sense of what the camera itself looked like a little bit better the
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camera was attached to a microscope at the end and the microscope originally as i mentioned um as with many of the early microscopes was able to magnify whatever it was put in front of it about six times um
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the original image later on he would have a much better microscope it would be able to magnify 64 times and then towards the end of his life he had yet another um more powerful microscope what it was like to actually
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use this is sort of remarkable and one of his colleagues a hwj humphries we'll talk about a little bit towards the end of our talk today at one point in time tried to write a description of what it was like to use this camera
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and here's what he said this is from w.a bentley and w.j humphrey's book called snow crystals this is what he says he says how is this done well first you catch your snow crystal this is conveniently done by holding a
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smooth blackboard a foot or so square a moment or two or as long as necessary in the following snow the catch is then taken under shelter to keep it from being blown off the board or otherwise disturbed where the light is good and the
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temperatures that of outdoors after a hasty inspection with a suitable magnifying glass a promising crystal if one is found is transferred carefully and with the most delicate touch to a suitable glass plate a microscopic slide with a small wooden splint and they're
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pressed down flat or brought into other proper position and made slightly to adhere to the glass by the gentle stroke of a small wing feather after this it would be more minutely examined with a microscope to determine whether or not
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it is worthy of photographic preservation if it seems to be worthy there is nothing worthless there's nothing to do of course but to start all over again when however a photograph of a crystal is to be obtained it obviously
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is necessary to take it with a photo micro micrograph camera and that is a microscope fitted with the camera bellows and a plate holder where the eyepiece normally is placed or farther removed the camera is turned towards the sky
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either directly or through a window then or previously if more convenient the crystal adhered to the glass slide is properly centered in front of the low power one half to three inch microscope objective and the focusing so adjusted
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as to give a picture of the desired size the plate holder is then put in position lens covered slide of plate holder drawn lens uncovered for the time of exposure lens covered again and the slide put back one may proceed now if one lights
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similarly to make other exposures okay well that took me a while to read can you imagine you have to do this and do this incredibly quickly because of course snowflakes melt uh if they get too warm and one of the things that
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bentley writes about is you know some of his early experimentations he would get everything set just right and then he would breathe and the snowflake would melt his very breath would take the snowflake it was incredibly complicated hooking up
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the camera to the microscope and i like this photograph because well one of the things you notice is that uh wilson wasn't all that tall and you may go wendy why are you talking about that but uh the reason why is the length of
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it to be able to adjust the microscope his arms weren't long enough and he actually had to invent kind of a holder that allowed him to adjust the microscope it was like a stick with an end on it so he could work
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the the lens itself because it was so difficult and and also look at the length of this and think about how heavy this would be to manage and to deal with and then the big problem was the question of exposure
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and that was really one of the big challenges you know how long did you have to leave the lens open on these early cameras how long did you leave the lens open in order to capture the image well he got his camera when he
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was 17 in 1883 and in 1885 at the age of 19 he had his first picture of the camera he had his first success in 1885 he was able to photograph using this incredible complicated system 20 snow crystals uh and i can only imagine
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when he first was successful what that must have been like eh to see a snow crystal and yeah it's sort of just the outline of it we get a sense a bit of the structure here over time as he perfected
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especially the manipulation of the lens more and more details came into place yet that first year 1885 he got 12 images of snow crystals uh interesting because uh of all the days and all the weeks to be talking about this
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um in 1928 it was his most successful 24 hours of taking pictures it was on valentine's day in 1928 there was a horrible storm it lasted two days he's called it the king of winter uh though because he was able to take 100
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photographs of snow crystals that particular day so here he is as you see him a little bit uh later with this camera all set up a little bit more sophisticated camera that we have here as he got a little bit older
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and we can watch him kind of in the process here he is trying to capture the snowflake with this microscope on um a slide and then what he would do is he would take the image and i'm so grateful that we have
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this picture we have very few pictures of him he loved to take pictures of other people of snow of nature and he like me hated hated having his picture actually taken but i'm grateful for this one because what we see him doing here is he would
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actually cut out the image so the original image that would be white on white with the outline around it and what he would do is he would take a very small knife and he would cut the image out of
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it and then you see it here he would put it on a black background and then then take up the photo again from there now just so that you know um he always kept those original negatives which is really
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important for scientists today who continue to use his images for the study of meteorology but we have the original uh still but he would take these pictures on the black background to make the details come forward and here you see what one of his slides
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one of his negatives would have looked like now i can't imagine what it must have been like for him the first day that he saw something that looks like this or or something that looked like this up here
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over time what he was able to do was the images got sharper and with increasing detail in them and just so much incredible beauty that he was able to capture he would really spend the rest of his life uh
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photographing uh snowflakes that look like this and many people go oh i've never heard of wilson snowflake now you see why bentley but you sort of do because if you've ever heard the phrase that no two snowflakes are alike
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that comes from bentley and from his research he's the person who actually was able to photograph snowflakes and discover that while in their beginnings while the original crystals were the same and the structure was the same that there was this infinite variety
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this infinite variety of images that would be produced oh he did photograph other things uh here's an image he got interested in clouds i always think of stiglitz being an amazing american photographer and his equivalences when i look at this image but
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this is a from bentley much earlier he was interested in clouds and totally fascinated with water he tried to capture raindrops uh in some of his images and just hold on uh this is an image he took uh using
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uh that camera of a spider's web covered in do oh yeah he could have spent his time you know photographing all these things or or even frost he did occasionally do photographs of frosts on window panes that looked like this and looked
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like this but really these were all kind of distractions from the thing that he loved the most which was the photographing of the snow crystals he would photograph them and eventually which took a long time he was well into his
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late 20s before he actually ever sold any of his images he sold them as lantern slides uh for five cents a piece uh and one of the first places to actually buy his images one of the first purchasers was was harvard
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university because they immediately recognized the scientific value for the study of media meteorology and also for physics cloud physics more specifically of of his images but five cents and it's so interesting to me he never charged more than five cents throughout
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his life uh as his fame increased across his lifetime never more than five cents uh for an image what we see in bentley in his studies and in his photographs is a rising understanding about well the formation the science
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of the snow crystal um he wrote many technical articles to try to explain how it is that a snow crystal that starts uh high up in the atmosphere all the same how because of things like wind moisture and temperature how that
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transforms and how it transforms that crystal exactly the same way along all six lines much of what we still know about this science bentley was able to discover not because he has a science background at all but because of his incredible
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careful observations of the little things that surrounded him um i can't begin and i wouldn't try to begin to explain the science of snow crystals but there is a great uh science uh cloud physicist uh who if you follow the link that's at
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the bottom of this screen or type in snow crystals uh he will explain all the details involved in the formation of snow crystals many of those details as i mentioned uh were first recognized and published in technical articles
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by bentley himself bentley was interested in the technical elements the science of the snowflake but he was also always very clear and very aware of the artistic elements or aspects of it this is what he wrote at one point in
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time he said the snow crystals come to us not only to reveal the wondrous beauty of the minute in nature but to teach us that all earthly beauty is transient and must soon fade away but though the beauty of the snow
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is evanescent like the beauties of the autumn as of the evening sky it fades to come again i find that passage so incredibly beautiful and i should have put it up on the slide i will uh be sure to pass it on to
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melanie so that she can share it with you when she sends out links to today's webinar for those who would like to revisit it or to follow some of the links about bentley's work and his writings i find
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that so beautiful he himself thought he was a terrible writer it took him a long time before he wrote but what i loved about it is his recognition that there was in his study of the snow crystal both incredible science
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but also incredible beauty these two elements always um combined together and i think that that becomes clearest here in this particular montage that he created in 1901 the pan-american expo occurred in buffalo and um bentley entered into the exposition this particular
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montage what he did was he created the snow crystal out of 120 images of snow crystals that he had taken it was the one and only time uh that he showed the montage um though he did take this negative of it
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he did take a slide of it so that's what we're having a chance to look at here today and his niece said that he had originally done something very similar but with his hand drawings that he had done before he
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had received the camera to be able to photograph it but i thought it was so beautiful an image that you would understand that science and art far from being separate were one in the same that they could be
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kind of reconciled in this particular way now bentley published as i mentioned widely in technical um magazines but he also published in popular magazines as well popular science had many articles by bentley in it as did harper's magazine probably one of my
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favorite uh articles that he wrote comes from harper where by the way he does talk about this relationship between science and art science and beauty and how they fit together with each other something that i think oftentimes uh we lose a sense of uh
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well he published wildly and while he was selling to universities and colleges because slides he figured at one point in time that he had spent about fifteen thousand dollars on his studies of the snowflake and he had received back only about four
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thousand dollars um luckily for that for him that farm that we saw that dairy farm that he grew up on in jericho was incredibly successful and it was able to fund him in many ways but he wasn't making a lot
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of money he wasn't making a lot of money by taking his show on the road either he became a very popular um lecturer and speaker coming including to montreal the one winter he didn't spend in vermont he spent in montreal
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as he spent time at mcgill university uh in order to to further his studies with meteorologists and physicists there who were interested in his work as a result of that he never made a lot of money he never had money to be able
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to publish and in 1929 being recognized by the scientific community for his incredible contribution uh to the study of the snow crystal um 60 scientists joined together to um publish the book that you saw me hold up a few minutes ago the
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book i read that elaborate uh explanation of what it was uh that he did here it is it's snow crystals and you notice it's written by bentley and one of those scientists who helped with the funding w.j humphries in it what we have as it
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says at the bottom is 2435 of the 5 000 images of snow crystals these beautiful works of art these beautiful scientific studies that bentley was able to create now the book did fall out of publication for a period of time
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uh but you can now purchase it uh once more just a warning there's a short very scientific essay uh at the beginning of the book and then it's just the images i know many people will go what but
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just trust me there are exquisite these 2453 images most of which the last 15 pages have some images of frost in them most of which were his beautiful study of um snow crystals now that same year 1929 uh
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bentley went out into a blizzard and uh went to a walk home and to take pictures uh during a snowstorm so from the age of 19 uh forward until his death every winter he was out in the snow but
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the winter of 1929 this particular blizzard was harsh and it was hard and um as a result of being left out in the blizzard probably too long he weakened his immune system and he would die that fear never to really understand all that he
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had accomplished i don't think um all that he had given us in terms of true beauty and in terms of true great knowledge uh 1929 he was he died as a result of complications due to pneumonia there is today if you go that
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farm remains there uh if you go today this plaque has been put up in his honor uh for 50 years wilson a bentley he was a farmer and a self-taught scientist developed his technique of photomicrography to reveal the world
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and the grandeur and mystery of the snowflake its universal hexagonical shape and its infinite number of lovely designs um i thought if i can take a minute i would read you the beautiful um obituary that was written in the burlington press it was the day
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before christmas um and this was part of a series of eulogies and tributes uh to bentley that was published on that particular day this was uh what was written longfellow said that genius is infinite painstaking john ruskin declared that genius
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is only a superior power of seeing wilson bentley was a living example of this type of genius he saw something in the snowflakes which other men failed to see not because they could not see but because they had not the patience
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and the understanding to look truly greatness blooms in quiet corners and flourishes under strange circumstances for wilson bentley was a greater man than many a millionaire who lives in the luxury of which the quote snowflake moon never dreamed well that eulogy
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and this ability of bentley his obsession maybe his dedication to the study to the beauty and the science of the snowflake of something so small in such harsh harsh times i i guess that's why i thought it was
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so important to kind of bring him to the forefront now during our winter the winter that we see on the outside in the winter that we find ourselves facing on the inside i mentioned at the beginning that there's a reference in the book of job
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to snow and at one point in time uh god asked job have you yet found the treasure in the snow and uh thinking of good old wilson snowflake bentley i think he was one of the rare people amongst us
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who could say i did i did indeed find the treasure in the snow thank you everybody uh for listening to this conversation uh and for sharing in a little bit of my total love and passion uh for uh bentley's amazing
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uh snow art and snow science uh melanie are you back with me uh yes i i am back um wow i am so i'm so moved by this man and and what he did i'm sort of at a loss for words um it's
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so inspiring um i can't tell you there is a marvelous um biography that i found and i think it's just a small press that wrote it it's called uh the snowflake man and it was done by duncan c blanchard
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uh i read this book in that place you saw me standing out on the lake that's all floating over and i found myself sort of weeping i have to say and i'm not really a weeper uh but there are some parts uh
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that are just so beautiful and for him to get us to look at these like little ordinary things and to find beauty and majesty in them yeah man like isn't that yeah what a an amazing human being and what a
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great model for us during our own winter i'm just imagining them or him transferring the snowflake from this black board onto like i was just trying to imagine how that would happen it's incredible um and the patience and breathe on it
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right like you breathe on it oh yeah like that's it and then your arms are too short and you can't adjust i don't know if you can see you can't adjust the microscope lens to get it clear so
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then like the innovation that he had i'm thinking about it i know some people who are with us today was uh were with us as well when i had a chance to talk about uh james audubon and in many ways i
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thought of him as sort of the audubon of snow uh in terms of you know both his innovation his artistry and also this incredible attention to detail that he had he's he's he's uh yeah well worth spending some time
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thinking about uh his model and his art um yeah i'm excited to to learn more to learn more about him thank you so much wendy what uh what a yeah i'm really moved and and inspired um and i have a question and i also yeah we
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would love to hear from you um wendy will be taking questions so please do send in your questions using the question function and while everybody's thinking of their questions just a couple quick reminders um we will send out the
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uh recording and links to the different resources that wendy mentioned um the massey lectures the biography all of the other um materials that she mentioned and another quick close on that yeah guess what i don't know if i've i had a
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chance to tell you yet uh but i just found out i'm gonna be a grandmother for the very first time and uh i already have one book for my uh grandbaby snowflake bentley if you were looking for a beautiful um
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account of this story and just great images of what bentley's life was like i can't begin to you know more highly recommend this for your children or your grandchildren it's written by jacqueline briggs martin illustrated by mary azarian
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and it won uh the caldecott medal uh for excellence in children's work so anyway sorry to interrupt but i i just said i don't know we'll include that as well it looks beautiful i am going to go get it myself um
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and uh once again oh so yes uh we'll we'll send all those resources including the children's book and um uh wendy has lots more coming up and if you want to um i guess then then aside from the
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armchair art tours the next big thing is her atonement seminar um her stuff has pretty much always sold out through through this past year so if you uh you want to get in on atonement don't wait um because her stuff sells out um
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so you can find more info on the classical pursuits website and a little further down the road going into the field with wendy uh in newfoundland in grow morn national park um wendy will be leading a trip with
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classic or sorry with uh worldwide quest sorry with worldwide quest sorry samantha uh and so that's this is a chance to go into the field with wendy uh we'll include information about that and um we know that you know
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there is uncertainty but we are very hopeful for our fall trips i know worldwide quest has been working really hard and uh for any worldwide quest trip whether it's a classical pursuits trip or wendy's trips any worldwide quest trip
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um through the end of march you can put down a 50 deposit it's very flexible you know we we we are committed and flexible we're just gonna we're gonna roll with this pandemic and we will be back on the road and wendy
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will be in grow morn in september um all right so let me just look here has questions yes questions have come in um oh carol you have uh carol read your mind wendy she uh she's mentioned this book by um
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jacqueline briggs martin so thanks carol for that and we'll again put that in the um in the uh follow-up and priscilla asks can you give the name of the author of the um so i'm not your question uh has a word here i'm not quite sure
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what you're asking do you mean the biography of bentley if you could just um yeah evently and i might have that there it is i i did something i think he's a you know small publishing company who knows whether they will survive uh
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and i do want to give duncan c blanchard a uh a plug for his beautiful biography of wilson a bentley and he goes back and looks at you know the history of snowflakes uh thank you for helping me with that uh
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the history of the family he does a really great job uh in giving this beautiful story so that that's the book uh and thanks for for asking because yeah support small publishers some more book stores yeah yeah um wendy my question was um the the
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works by glacier that you showed toward the beginning uh were they um were they pen and ink what did what did he how did he make those yeah you know what and some more pen and ink um if some are painted painting a snowflake
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is incredibly difficult did i mention my feeble attempt to embroider one uh and i was looking at it and i'm going i failed they're not the same no it's good looks better from afar i think but uh a lot of things are like pen and
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ink drawings and like i said i wish i'm going to go looking for a biography of moisture because uh the beauty of those drawings and just the patience of drawing a snowflake and uh you know i would love folks you know
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try give your your give it a try and uh if you if you do is send them uh on to us and i'd love to have a chance to look at them and and share them with others if
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you're interested it is incredibly complicated uh the one person that i kind of missed in that history coming up to bentley and his photographs was there was an anonymous woman who did a book of cut outs and i don't know about you but you remember
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doing cutouts of snowflakes in school and all that i still do cut out some snowflakes yeah well and also you know reinstill that sense of wonder at the small things that surround us all the time especially during the pandemic
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uh yeah rock on and do some cut out snowflakes but she did this incredibly detailed book of snowflakes and uh we never knew who she was or or where it came from but she did publish that um but yeah glacier's just such an
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interesting guy he was also as i think i mentioned one of the co-founders of the royal meteorological society eventually and has an important role in the history of uh meteorology so uh yeah there you go a little bit about it i'm
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gonna go find out more though because uh again one of those people who combine science and art and are filled with wonder thanks wendy so again if there uh do send in questions if you have any i guess i i have one more question um do
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is there a scientific answer to why there are uh why snowflakes are hexagons has anybody figured out the the core reason for it i think okay so i've spent some time over getting ready for this doing something that uh it's sort of my idea of torture
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but i wanted to understand more of the science of of the snowflake and so i went on the websites especially that great website called the snow crystal that i mentioned where they try to explain the science of it
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and i think as to why six remains a bit of a mystery and so interesting because that's one of the first observations we have all the way back from 135 uh bc uh we have more understanding about why um all
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six branches are the same and that has to do with the fact that you have a crystal that starts the same in the high atmosphere as it falls towards the ground uh what happens is it's subjected to the
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same weather uh to the same amount of moisture into the same temperature so that's why all six branches uh become the same but to the question of why six i think it remains sort of a mystery i i didn't find
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anybody who could give me a good answer or at least one that i could follow uh as to why it's a hexagon but there are also other shapes which people don't know that probably the most rare of snowflakes isn't a hexagon but a
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triangle just think on that for a little bit um and so there's a research and so interesting that wilson bentley actually identified all the various shapes the fundamental shapes of snowflakes through his his photographs but also that he realized
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that there were these small tubes of air that caused um the formation their specific formations so if you think about him as an amateur scientist and what he contributed it's quite remarkable thanks wendy um something else just came
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in here chris okay chris is uh sending an article from scientific american yeah i think we go ahead sorry go ahead wendy oh no thank you send send anything that can kind of explain all the intricacies of it uh because as
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i was saying i'm i'm still fascinated uh to try to understand the science behind it and science is i'm a philosopher science is a struggle for me uh and i think i mentioned i'm interested in wonder and i'm really interested in the natural
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world i've spent most of my career uh talking about art and artistic achievement thinking that science is the last frontier for me uh as i continue uh my wonder project so uh thank you for sending that and uh
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we'll share it with others as well yeah thank you chris and just a comment from mary lou um kind of echo echoing what you had talked about earlier in your presentation wendy um she says i'm trying to imagine how
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amazing it must have been for him to see a snow crystal in his early pictures oh yeah it yeah the physical sensation of like seeing this thing that you've been how amazing is dreaming about it and the one
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thing and i i will warn people i'm sorry i did disappear i'm just leaning over to get my copy of snow crystals this is the um reprint of that original one it went out of print for a long
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period of time but uh is back in print now uh by dover publications uh there's also a smaller version it's not all 2453 uh of the images but one of the things that i really admired about this particular
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publication is they tried to put them in order chronologically so one of the things i didn't talk about was that when he started to take these photographs um the good the bad and the ugly he kept incredibly detailed notebooks he
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kept two notebooks all the time one which listed the photographs that he took and sort of the circumstances what was good what was bad and what was not so you know the good the bad and the ugly of his experimentations
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with i'm gonna try photomicrography uh and um he also kept another notebook at the same time which was a very detailed account of the weather um and anyways if they were able to use the notebooks to try to put the
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images in some kind of chronological order and you see like the very simple and i showed you one of those earlier ones which is just sort of the hexagon um and and you see the details coming forward i tried to in my presentation today to
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put them in some kind of order something akin to how he would have discovered more and more detail so i guess the reason i mentioned that is it wasn't just that amazement at seeing one of the crystals finally
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appear that must have been phenomenal but it has more and more detail as he got better and better at photographing him and so much about how long to leave the lens open and and the kind of lighting you had to
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be under that he had to experiment with it was a constant process of amazement and many of the essays that he wrote are filled with that sense of true wonder at what he was discovering at the beauty of what he was able to see
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so i'm with you on that one and and think about you know many people today uh maybe you're seeing some of his images for the first time or else they didn't know it was a bentley snowflake that they
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were looking at um you know we look at them and we gasp at their beauty could you imagine what it was like for him that's just phenomenal um we have one last question from kathleen and maybe some of the links also would
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answer this question uh are ice crystals also hexagonal yes ice crystals are hexagonal and when ice crystals come together they become a snowflake so this was took me a very long time and there are great there are great uh videos out there that
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show this that kind of explain it so what he was really interested in what he's taking pictures of aren't snowflakes but the elemental building blocks of snowflakes which are snow crystals and snow crystals or hawks of hexagonal and when they come together
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they form an accident crazy yeah very cool very cool i think that's all the questions we have for today yes so thank you again wendy thank you so much for for this this incredible presentation it really made made my day and i hope it made the
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day of everybody else listening thanks for being with us so again we'll be back uh same time same place next week wendy will be talking about uh the artists of cape dorset nunavut in northern canada and then the week after that the third
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part of this series uh q a with the arctic watercolorist david mccowan we'll be joining wendy we're really happy to have him come talk with all of you and uh more to do with wendy atonement march 27th and grow morn in september
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uh as always feel feel free to contact us with any questions uh samantha worldwide quest me at classical pursuits and we will get you an answer thank you again everyone so much for being part of our armchair art tours and
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thank you wendy thank you samantha and we look forward to seeing everyone next week thanks everybody bye have a good day
Topics:Wilson BentleySnowflake photographyMicrophotographyWinter artArmchair Art TourWendy O'BrienSnow crystalsNature wonderClassical PursuitsWorldwide Quest Travel
