Wikipedia:Picture of the day/May 2017

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Photograph: Spongepuppy

Rubens Peale (1784–1865) was an American artist and museum director. Son of artist-naturalist Charles Willson Peale and brother of artist Rembrandt Peale, Rubens took up painting after a lengthy career managing such museums as the Peale Museum in Baltimore and his own New York Museum of Natural History and Science in New York City. In the last decade of his life, he produced 130 paintings.

Shown here is Rubens Peale With a Geranium, an 1801 portrait by Rubens' brother Rembrandt. This painting's 1985 sale to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., set a record for an American work of art sold at auction.

Painting: Rembrandt Peale

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Lithograph: Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler and James Moyer; restoration: Adam Cuerden

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An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump is an oil painting on canvas completed by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1768. It shows a natural philosopher recreating one of Robert Boyle's air pump experiments, in which a bird is deprived of air, before a varied group of onlookers. They exhibit a variety of reactions, but for most of them scientific curiosity overcomes concern for the bird. The painting has been owned by the National Gallery, London, since 1863 and is regarded as a masterpiece of British art.

Painting: Joseph Wright of Derby

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Sofia Church, named after the Swedish queen Sophia of Nassau, is one of the major churches in Stockholm, Sweden. Designed during an architectural contest in 1899 and inaugurated in 1906, it belongs to Sofia parish of the Church of Sweden.

Photograph: Arild Vågen

Skull of a male North Sulawesi babirusa, a species from the pig family endemic to Indonesia. Babirusas are notable for the long upper canines in the males that emerge vertically from the alveolar process, penetrating though the skin and curving backward over the front of the face and towards the forehead.

Photograph: Didier Descouens

Roses is a 1893 painting by P.S. Krøyer, one of the most successful artists of the community known as the Skagen Painters. The work is one of several that shows Krøyer's wife Marie. In this painting, Marie is seated in a deckchair under a large rose bush in the garden of the couple's house in Skagen, with their dog Rap asleep beside her. The painting was sold for 3.1 million Danish kroner in 1985 and was donated anonymously to the Skagens Museum in 2008.

Painting:

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The Namaqua chameleon (Chamaeleo namaquensis) is a lizard found in the western desert regions of Namibia, South Africa, and southern Angola. This species, which can reach 25 cm (9.8 in) in length, is common in the Namib Desert. It has evolved several adaptations which allow it to thrive in hot and arid areas, such as the ability to change color to control temperature.

Photograph: Yathin S Krishnappa

A photograph of British soldiers loading a shrapnel shell during World War I. Published in The Illustrated War News, this image was captioned:

"Our illustration gives an interior view, so to speak, of a gun-position, in the British lines at the front, screened by head-cover to escape observation by German airmen. The overhead covering is seen with its deceptive thatch, apparently of straw, and the gunners are shown in action loading the gun. The man to the left is setting the time-fuse of a shrapnel shell."

Photograph: Photopress; restoration: Adam Cuerden

A Company of Danish Artists in Rome, painted by

Painting: Constantin Hansen

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who formalised the modern system of naming organisms called binomial nomenclature. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy".

Born in the countryside of Småland, Linnaeus received most of his higher education at Uppsala University and began giving lectures in botany there in 1730. He studied abroad between 1735 and 1738, and published the first edition of his Systema Naturae in the Netherlands. Upon his return to Sweden, he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect and classify animals, plants, and minerals, and published several volumes. At the time of his death, he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe.

Painting: Alexander Roslin

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A peacock butterfly (Aglais io) resting on blackthorn at Otmoor RSPB reserve in Oxfordshire, England. The peacock's four large eyespots on its wings act as an anti-predator defence mechanism.

Photograph: Charles J. Sharp

Hawksmoor Towers at

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