Lady Eliza Maria Gordon Cumming (1795-1842), fossil collector and artist
Eliza Maria, Lady Gordon-Cumming of Altyre. Painted by Saunders about 1830. Photogravure by Emery Walker. Published in her daughter’s book: C F Gordon Cumming, 'Memories', Edinburgh: Blackwood (1904). Source: Project Gutenberg.
Eliza Maria Campbell (c.1795-1842) was the granddaughter of John Campbell, 5th Duke of Argyll. She married Sir William Gordon Cumming, 2nd Bart, of Altyre, Dallas, Gordonstoun and Roseisle, in September 1815. Now Lady Gordon Cumming, she was known for the usual accomplishments expected in a young lady of the nobility such as beauty, drawing and embroidery. Lady Gordon Cumming also added horticulture (cross breeding plant species within her own greenhouse, which was the first to be constructed in Moray) as well as salmon fishing, which was relatively daring at the time.
Lady Gordon Cumming is probably most notable today for her fossil collecting activities which lasted only around three years until her early death at the age of 44. She was first introduced to the subject by the Scottish geologist John Malcolmson (1803-1844), an army surgeon and Fellow of the Geological Society in the spring of 1839.
Malcolmson, whose mother was from nearby Forres, had been inspired to hunt for fish fossils in the area in 1837 after reading Hugh Miller’s book ‘Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland, or The traditional history of Cromarty’ (1835). The book contained descriptions of "beds of a greyish stratified claystone which have been laid bare by the sea" which were "thickly interspersed with flattened nodules of an elliptical or circular form" that when broken revealed various types of unusual fossil fish. After meeting with Miller and borrowing specimens from his collection, Malcolmson set out to try and find more examples of these bony plated fish in and around Elgin. Now known as placoderms, Malcolmson exhibited some examples at the Geological Society in 1838. He took them to Paris to show Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), the foremost expert on fossil fish who was currently engaged on his multi-volumed book 'Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles' (1833-1843/4), a work which was intended to compile all known forms of fossil fish. Whilst Agassiz was very interested, confusion arose as the different species had been confounded due to lack of compete examples. In 1839 Malcolmson returned to Moray determined to write a memoir on its geology and hunt for more fossils. It was the discovery of a bed of remarkably preserved specimens in a quarry at Lethen Bar which is thought to have triggered Lady Gordon Cumming’s interest in collecting them herself.
Map of Elgin and Nairn from Patrick Duff’s ‘Sketch of the geology of Moray’ (1842). GSL Library collection. Click here to enlarge
Altyre is just below Forres, and the quarries of Lethen Bar and Clune where a large proportion of Gordon Cumming’s specimens came from are marked in pink to the left.
As a member of the aristocracy Lady Gordon Cumming didn’t necessarily venture into the quarries to chip them out herself. Instead she requested the quarrymen to put them aside for her (footnote 1). Her daughter Constance described how every evening dogcarts full of grey nodules would be delivered to the house where they would be tapped open to reveal “two perfect sides of strange fossil fishes, with the very colour of the scales still vivid” [C F Gordon Cumming, 'Memories', Edinburgh: Blackwood (1904), p39]. She also exchanged specimens with Hugh Miller and other collectors, receiving in return material from Cromarty, Gamrie, Dipple and Scaat Craig. By 1840 her collection filled up a whole room in Altyre House, with the poorer specimens stored outside under the verandah.
Lady Gordon Cumming and her eldest daughter Lady Seymour also made drawings of the specimens, a number of which Malcolmson wanted to include in his paper "On the Relations of the different parts of the Old Red Sandstone in which Organic Remains have recently been discovered, in the Counties of Moray, Nairn, Banff, and Inverness", which was read before the Geological Society on 5 May 1839. The response to the paper was positive, but as the accompanying fossils were mainly fish the intention was to delay the paper's publication until Louis Agassiz could cast his expert eye over them. Agassiz did not return to Britain in 1839 as expected and with Malcolmson’s return to India in the spring of 1840 (where he died in 1844) the memoir was all but forgotten. It would eventually be published, minus all of the illustrations, in 1859.
When Agassiz did come back to Britain in the autumn of 1840 he visited Lady Gordon Cumming in October and persuaded her to send specimens to his London base at the Geological Society (and possibly to his home in Neuchâtel, Switzerland) in order to be copied by his artists Joseph Dinkel ([1806-1891]) and Jacques Bourkhardt ([1808]-1867). It is mainly these drawings which appear in his book ‘Monographie des poissons fossiles du vieux grès rouge ou système Dévonien des Îles Britanniques et de Russie’ (1844-1845) – which concentrated solely on recently discovered Devonian fish of Britain and Russia.
However when Agassiz visited the Geological Society the next month, he came across Lady Gordon Cumming's drawings which had been part of Malcolmson's memoir and took these back with him to Neuchâtel. At least two were subsequently made into plates in ‘Monographie des poissons fossiles du vieux grès rouge....'
Outline drawing of Pterichthys cornutus by Lady Gordon Cumming published in Patrick Duff’s ‘Sketch of the geology of Moray’(1842). GSL Library collection.
Letter from Eliza Gordon Cumming to Roderick Murchison, 14 April 1842. (GSL Archive ref: LDGSL/838/G/11/1)
In this letter to Roderick Murchison (1792-1871), who had just returned from Russia where he defined the Permian System, Lady Gordon states that she is sending him more drawings of her specimens and complains that the previous ones were “carried off” and copied by Louis Agassiz without permission.
Interestingly Lady Gordon Cumming states her intention to bring out her own work on fossil fish as she believed she understood her fish better than Louis Agassiz. In the letter she also enquires about Murchison's familiarity with Russian specimens of Pterichthys as she wanted to understand their tail and fin anatomy in order to reconstruct them properly in her drawings.
The letter is written in the hand of her eldest daughter Lady Seymour who transcribed her mother's wishes from her sickbed, a week before she died.
Right: Cheirolepis cummingiae, coloured lithograph based on an original drawing by Lady Eliza Gordon Cumming, published in Louis Agassiz’s ‘Monographie des poissons fossiles du vieux grès rouge ou système Dévonien (Old Red Sandstone) des Îles Britanniques et de Russie’ (1844-1845), tab 12. GSL Library collection.
This lithograph is presumably based on one of the drawings "carried off" by Louis Agassiz in 1840. The species was named in Lady Gordon Cumming’s honour by Agassiz to mark her discovery of it in Lethen Bar.
Left: Pterichthys latus from Louis Agassiz’s ‘Monographie des poissons fossiles du vieux grès rouge..’ (1844/1845) Tab 3, fig 3. GSL Library collection.
Only two drawings in Agassiz’s book are attributed to Lady Gordon Cumming. This may be because she and her daughter appear to have been keen to reconstruct missing parts of a specimen not always correctly (see letter above) or in a way in which Agassiz did not agree. The two women were not alone in this aim, however. Other contemporary collectors such as Patrick Duff and Hugh Miller were just as keen and misinterpreted displacements of the dermal plates as appendages when depicting these strange, new creatures.
Agassiz had some of Lady Gordon Cumming's drawings redrafted by his favourite artist Joseph Dinkel such as this one which he states: “The head, which is not very well preserved in the illustrated specimens, but which I can see quite distinctly in a drawing by Lady Gordon Cuming [sic], is short, almost circular, and appears to be set between the shoulders.” [translation from the original French in Agassiz, J L R, ‘Monographie des poissons fossiles du vieux grès rouge..’ (1844/1845), p13]
Right: Pencil and ink drawing of the fossil fish Osteolepis major, probably by Lady Gordon Cumming, [?1839]. (GSL Archive ref: LDGSL/614/3/114b).
The Geological Society holds the majority of the artwork for Louis Agassiz's fossil fish publications. None of Lady Gordon Cumming's drawings which were taken by Agassiz survive in the collection save this one.
This drawing may not be representative of the rest of her images, but the original artwork for the more detailed published lithographs is not thought to have survived. (fn. 2)
Watercolour of Diplopterus macrocephalus Agassiz by Jacques Bourkardt, 1841. (GSL Archive ref: LDGSL/615/27/2). From Lethen Bar in the collection of Lady Gordon Cumming.
A lithograph of this specimen appears as Tab 17 in Agassiz’s ‘Monographie des poissons fossiles du vieux grès rouge..’ (1844/1845). Agassiz wrote that the only examples he knew of this species were from Lady Gordon Cumming’s collection.
Right: Watercolour of Pterichthys cornutus by Joseph Dinkel, [1840-1844]. From Lethen Bar, in the collection of the Geological Society. (GSL Archive ref: LDGSL/616/2/9/1)
Around August or September 1840, Lady Gordon Cumming was visited by William Willoughby Cole (1807-1886), an avid fossil fish collector who persuaded her to give him a large selection of specimens. He shared the best material with Philip de Malpas Grey Egerton (1806-1881) his equally avid fossil fish collector friend. After Roderick Murchison jokingly accused them of piracy, Cole sheepishly passed on a selection to the Geological Society’s Museum. This specimen of part of the tail of Pterichthys cornutus (drawn enlarged on the right as it is very small) is an example of the kind of material that was left after the two men had taken the best specimens for themselves.
Lady Gordon Cumming’s fossil collecting activities were suddenly cut short. Just a week after her 13th child was born she died on 21 April 1842. According to her daughter Constance, her death was likely as a result of an earlier event when "she had been severely injured when stopping a bolting horse in a gig wherein sat a terrified woman. That injury caused her intense suffering...". [C F Gordon Cumming, 'Memories', Edinburgh: Blackwood (1904), p43]
In 1871 her collection was given on long term loan to the newly opened Falconer museum in Forres but is now held by the National Museum of Scotland.
fn 1 - Louis Agassiz in his ‘‘Monographie des poissons fossiles du vieux grès rouge ou système Dévonien des Îles Britanniques et de Russie’ (1844-1845) was of the understanding that the quarry was specifically worked for fossils for Lady Gordon Cumming.
fn 2 - In Mahala Andrews’ book ‘The discovery of fossil fishes in Scotland up to 1845’, Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum (1982) it is suggested that four unsigned watercolours of fish from Lethen Bar, held by the British Geological Survey (BGS archive ref: GSM/XG/F/10), and which date from this period are the work of Lady Gordon Cumming as two show partially reconstructed specimens. However these drawings are almost certainly by the artist Joseph Dinkel as they conform to the format of the Agassiz commissioned drawings. Later, corrected versions by Dinkel are held within the Agassiz collection in the Society’s archive and were published in Agassiz’s book.