GoKawiilI spent last week at Harvard doing research in the archives of William James, the psychologist, philosopher, psychical researcher, brother of Henry James, and all around interesting person. He was a brilliant, charming, self-defeating, deeply strange man (exhibit A: he believed taking a high dose of nitrous oxide helped him finally understand Hegel). That mixture of qualities comes across vividly in his papers.
What doesn’t, at least at first, is that he was a talented visual artist. In fact, before he became a psychologist, William James dreamed of being a professional painter. He studied for several years in his late teens and early twenties under the painter William Morris Hunt.
John la Farge’s portrait of a young William James at the easel, when they were both art students, circa 1859.
Although none of William’s paintings appear to survive, a careful reader of his archive will find evidence that he continued to draw throughout his life.
Here he is, for instance, doodling on an envelope addressed to him from Geneva:
Doodles on a letter to James from 1898, photographed by me at the Houghton Library, Harvard.
Readers of The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand’s wonderful book about James and his circle, will recognize the image below as William’s sensitive drawing of his brother Wilkie while he was recovering from being shot during the Civil War.
Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard.
The visual creativity of James is not just a clue about how his own mind worked. It’s also part of a larger shift in the culture of science during his generation: in the nineteenth century, design and the nascent world of big data came together, for the first time, to create the modern concept of data visualization.
Although James and his collaborators are rarely mentioned in discussions of the origins of data visualization, they actually played a very important role in shaping it. They were the consolidators and extenders of a new paradigm — the generation after the famous names in the field like William Playfair and Florence Nightingale.
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