Darwin, Beauty and Sexual Selection highlights Darwin’s notions of beauty in nature, in particular as it relates to courtship display among animals. The focus is on birds, the ‘most aesthetic’ creature after man, Darwin believed. Telling juxtapositions between paintings by James Tissot, Frederick Sandys and D.G. Rossetti, feathered fashion accessories, caricatures and brilliantly coloured ornithological specimens illuminate the parallels that Darwin himself drew between the display of beautiful, sexually-alluring features by birds and by man (or, more commonly, woman). Female mate choice was one of the most controversial and disturbing aspects of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. The exhibition shows that, despite his own conventional views on the position of woman in society, Darwin was thought to have contributed to the emergence of a dangerously liberated ‘new woman’ – here forcefully evoked in works by the Belgian painter and printmaker, Félicien Rops.

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