Terror, Tenderness, and the Art of Buoyancy in Despair: How Ernst Haeckel’s Personal Tragedy Begot His Stunning 19th-Century Drawings of Jellyfish

A story of transmuting the grief of one life into a celebration of the grandeur of Life.

I hope you are able to work hard on science & thus banish, as far as may be possible, painful remembrances, Charles Darwin wrote in the spring of 1864 to a young and obscure German correspondent who had just sent him two folios of his stunningly illustrated studies of tiny single-celled marine organisms a masterwork that enchanted Darwin as one of the most majestic things he had ever seen.

But Ernst...