Art Collection

The Art Collection contains more than 12,000 works of art, including original paintings, pen and ink, colored pencil, scratchboard drawings, nearly 1,000 nature prints, as well as a variety of lithographs, etchings, engravings, aquatints, and commercial reproductions of plants and the insects/animals related to them.

Some highlights of this collection include:

• 72 exquisite original gouache paintings by Barbara Regina Dietzsch, an 18th century German artist
• Numerous prints from Audubon's glorious Birds of America
• Original artwork by contemporary local artists Nancy Hart, Carol Lerner, Tony Tyznik, and May Watts
• Hundreds of nature prints created by author Alice Thoms Vitale used to illustrate her book Leaves:in Myth, Magic & Medicine
• Hand-colored stipple engraved plates of trees by Pierre Joseph Redouté
• Trudy Nicholson's scratchboard of a white oak
• Hand-colored engravings by Georg Dionysius Ehret
• Over 60 watercolor paintings depicting mushrooms by Illinois artist Helene Warder Beggs
• 24 stipple-engraved plates of flower portraits from Les Fleurs dessinees d'apres nature (Paris, 1801) by Gerard van Spaendonck
• Hand-colored engravings by Pancrace Bessa