The Pursuit of Perfection: Ellery Foutch Explores Art, Science, and the Natural World

In her new book, A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), Ellery Foutch, associate professor of American studies, explores an unlikely connection: What do a 19th-century bodybuilder, a collection of preserved butterflies, and famous glass flowers have in common?

She sought to answer this question by examining how artists, naturalists, and performers attempted to preserve perfection through art and science. This pursuit, she discovered, can threaten the very life and vitality that make something extraordinary in the first place.

We spoke with Foutch at Crossroads Café about her research, unexpected findings, and what the pursuit of perfection reveals about people, art, nature, and the human body.

How did you become interested in the idea of perfection?

It’’s kind of a funny story because it came out of two very different research projects. When I was at Williams College for my graduate program, I worked as a research and curatorial assistant to Nancy Mowll Mathews, who was working on an exhibition about American art and early film. One of the first performers filmed for Thomas Edison’’s newly invented Kinetoscope was a bodybuilder named Eugen Sandow, known as the “Perfect Man.” He was a vaudeville performer who also posed for mass-produced photographs sold as souvenirs after his performances. I found interesting parallels between the plaster casts artists used for figure drawing and Sandow’s performances. Reviews of his performances emphasized the transformation of a man into sculpture and the tension between something living and something preserved.

A couple of years later, I was researching the work of Titian Ramsay Peale, an artist and naturalist known for his landscapes who also had numerous projects involving butterflies and moths. His writings repeatedly referred to perfection, and there was this same tension between the liveliness of a butterfly and the dead specimens he collected and preserved. It struck me that bodybuilders at the end of the 19th century and the preservation of butterflies at the beginning of the century shared this language and these obsessions with perfection. It seemed like something bigger was going on.

How did you decide which examples to explore in the book?

Sandow and Peale became the anchors for the project because I already had that research background. I had also visited the glass flowers at Harvard as an undergraduate. One day, I remembered them and became curious about the collection’s history. It turned out that the collection was commissioned in 1887, during a similar cultural moment, providing another example of this broader fascination with perfection.

What did perfection mean to people during this period, and how did your research shape your understanding of it?

One of the things that struck me was how often the words “perfect” and “perfection” appeared in writings about these works. But they often meant different things. In the book, I look at dictionary definitions of perfection from the period. One describes a representation that is exact in all its particulars. Another describes something without flaw or defect. But what if you’re making an exact representation of someone who has a mole or a pimple, or a flower that’’s been eaten by a bug? Does a perfect representation include those flaws, or do you eliminate them? That tension between realism and idealism fascinated me. The real world is almost never perfect, and the impossibility of perfection is something I’m still grappling with.

For Titian Peale to perfectly represent a butterfly with all its details, he had to kill it so it would remain still long enough for him to record its patterns. There’s this tension between loving something so much that you want to preserve it and yet killing the very thing you’re studying. Peale arranged his dead specimens in beautiful patterns between sheets of glass and bound those boxes with booklike covers, sometimes with leather spines and gold lettering. Rather than illustrating a book, he used the specimens themselves as illustrations. There’’s a similar contradiction with Sandow. To look perfect, he had to freeze himself in these poses. When the British Museum of Natural History tried to take a plaster cast of his entire body, he nearly suffocated. He described it as the most excruciating torture he’d ever experienced. These attempts to preserve perfection threatened the vitality of the subjects themselves.

Why were people in the 19th century interested in preserving perfection?

A lot of the scholarship about the 19th century emphasizes nostalgia—the idea that things were better in the past and that there was a simpler time we might want to return to. Others were very optimistic about technology and progress. They believed the best days were ahead and perfection might be attainable in the future. But the 19th century was also deeply invested in the idea of the “course of empire,” the belief that civilizations rise, flourish, reach a peak, and inevitably decline. I became interested in what happens when people believe they’ve reached that perfect moment and want to preserve it. Rather than looking backward or forward, what if the goal was to hold on to perfection in the present and keep it from disappearing?

Were there discoveries during your research that surprised you?

There were moments when the findings felt almost too good to be true. Usually, when you’re reading an artist’’s correspondence, you don’t expect them to talk directly about the particular aspect of their practice you’re researching. You’re looking for clues. But in the correspondence between the Blaschkas (Leopold and Rudolf), who made the glass models, and their patrons in the United States, I found lengthy passages about how flowers bloomed and faded too quickly. They complained about a new streetcar in their neighborhood because it was noisy and moved too fast. They wished time would slow down so they could better make their models.

I also discovered that a museum in India had purchased one of the casts of Sandow and classified it as fine art, alongside photographs of classical sculptures, rather than as a natural history specimen. Those were exciting discoveries because they reinforced the connections I was exploring.

How does the book contribute to the study of art and cultural history?

Part of it is taking objects that aren’t usually studied as works of art—botanical models, specimen boxes, or even somewhat absurd photographs of bodybuilders—and asking serious questions about them. I’m using methods from art history, including close visual examination and the study of how objects were received and understood, to look at things that often fall outside traditional categories of fine art. The book sits at the intersection of art, natural history, and popular culture, exploring questions about time, representation, and relationships between humans and the natural world.