There Was Perhaps a First Vision Attempted in the Flower

1883

Lithograph on China paper, image 22.5 × 17.7 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago

An eye opens at the top of a plant stalk, ringed by lashes like petals. The print imagines a moment when sight first appeared in living things.

Human anatomy and plant growth merge into one creature. Hybrid forms like this recur often in his early prints, which imagine stages of life no one could witness.
It is the second of eight plates in the album Les Origines.
Look at the speckled ground: the stalk rises from it like a seedling.
The plates were first made without captions, which came later because a patron asked for them.
A second impression is in Washington's National Gallery of Art, from the Rosenwald Collection.

The album traces life from simple organisms toward human form. It draws on Darwin and on French theories of evolution.