Narrator: Chief Curator Emily Beeny: 

Emily Beeny: Jacques Linard, French painter active in the 1620s and 1630s, painted almost nothing but seashells. We see the shells of lots of different species - the sort of crusty, spiny freckled exteriors, and then the smooth, nacreous insides. I think Linard helps us understand what he and his contemporaries found most marvelous about these objects, which would of course have been gathered on the shores of the Pacific, of the Indian Ocean, of corners of the globe that Linard himself would never have visited.

Such objects became avidly collected in the 17th century by Europeans both as sources of knowledge and understanding about the natural world and as objects of aesthetic wonderment. 

Narrator: Beautiful as they are, there’s a brutal side to their story. 

Emily Beeny: Many of these objects would never have found their way to Europe, were it not for the kinds of trade networks that also involved enslavement, tremendous environmental destruction, exploitation of people and of natural resources – a lot of the really dark transformations wrought by European global exploration and colonization in the period - so the transfer of these natural wonders to European shores was not without violence.