Ernst Haeckel’s Gamochonia: The Story Behind a (1904.) Octopus and Squid Plate

Some historical images grab you because they feel alive. Gamochonia does it through order. The page gathers octopuses and squid into a single composition that feels vivid, precise, and slightly strange from the first look. It appeared as plate 54 in Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), a series first published in sets between 1899. and 1904. and then collected in a complete 1904. edition. The project became one of the most recognizable examples of natural history turning into visual culture, with marine life, printmaking, and design all meeting on the same page.

The story behind this original

Gamochonia comes from Haeckel’s great visual survey of life forms, Kunstformen der Natur. The work was built from his sketches and watercolors and issued as a set of 100 lithographic plates. Smithsonian Ocean describes the publication as a landmark of naturalist illustration, and Museum Wales notes that it was published in installments from 1899. to 1904. before appearing as a complete volume in 1904. The plate itself is tied specifically to cephalopods, and surviving records identify it as plate 54.

The page carries an older label, Gamochonia, for the group Haeckel was presenting here. A Biodiversity Heritage Library post on the plate describes it as showing squids and octopuses classified under that historical heading. That matters, because the image was designed as a comparison page from the start. It was made to help you see differences in body plan, arm arrangement, and movement across related marine animals.

What people miss when they look at this piece

The first thing most people notice is the color and the drama of the arms. The easier thing to miss is the structure. This is not one octopus shown five times. The plate is built from five different cephalopod figures. The Biodiversity Heritage Library key identifies them as Chiroteuthis veranyi, Histioteuthis ruppelii, Pinnoctopus cordiformis, Octopus vulgaris, and Octopus granulatus. Once you know that, the page starts to read less like decoration and more like a very deliberate visual comparison.

Another thing people often miss is how cleanly Haeckel controls the page. The animals are spread out enough that each silhouette stays readable. The curves of the arms create movement, but the composition never turns messy. That balance is a big reason the plate still works so well now. You can enjoy it from across the room, but it gets better when you move closer and begin to notice the cups, the webbing, the eye placement, and the change in rhythm from one figure to the next.

Why this original mattered in its own time

In Haeckel’s time, plates like this mattered because they helped turn classification into something visible. The Metropolitan Museum describes a comparable plate from Kunstformen der Natur as a “typological comparison,” and that phrase fits Gamochonia well. Haeckel was arranging organisms so viewers could compare them quickly and clearly. At the same time, Smithsonian Ocean notes that the publication reached a broad public and helped popularize scientific understanding of marine organisms that many people had never seen or thought about closely.

The book also mattered beyond science. The Met’s essay on Art Nouveau says that the movement’s flowing curves drew in part from illustrations of deep-sea organisms such as Haeckel’s. In other words, these plates were feeding design culture as well as natural history. That helps explain why Gamochonia still feels fresh. It comes from science, but it also belongs to the visual world that shaped early modern design.

How accurate was it really?

What it gets right

The plate gets the main cephalopod distinctions right in a broad anatomical sense. Britannica describes cephalopods as animals with arms and tentacles, eight or ten in most living forms. It further separates octopuses and squids in modern classification: octopuses fall under Octopoda and have eight highly contractile sucker-bearing arms, while squids fall under Teuthoidea and typically have eight arms plus two tentacles. That makes Gamochonia a strong comparison image, because it presents real differences in body plan and appendages that still matter in modern biology.

Where its limits show

The limit is in the label and in the staging. Gamochonia is a historical grouping, not the language a modern cephalopod text would use. Modern higher classification sorts these animals differently, and Britannica’s current overview places octopuses and squids within Coleoidea under separate orders. The image is also stylized. Smithsonian Ocean says Kunstformen der Natur is “stylized for artistic effect,” even while it remains detailed and scientifically valuable. So the plate is accurate in the way a serious natural history image can be accurate: the anatomy is observed carefully, but the arrangement is sharpened to make the page clearer, stronger, and more memorable.

About Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel was a German zoologist and evolutionist who spent much of his career studying marine life. Britannica says he studied at Würzburg and Berlin, joined an expedition to observe small sea creatures off Heligoland, and later became professor of zoology at Jena in 1862. Those details matter here, because Gamochonia does not feel like the work of someone casually borrowing ocean imagery. It comes from a naturalist who had spent years looking closely at marine organisms and thinking hard about form, development, and classification.

He also had unusual visual instincts. Smithsonian Ocean describes Kunstformen der Natur as an instant success partly because the plates joined Art Nouveau visual energy with scientific commentary that general readers could follow. That combination helps explain why Haeckel still stands out. He knew how to make biological structure readable on the page without draining it of visual power.

Why I chose to recreate this one

This plate stood out to me because it feels controlled without feeling cold. A lot of natural history images give you information. This one also gives you rhythm. The arms pull your eye around the page, the forms stay clear, and the whole image carries that old printed-book feeling I always come back to.

I also like the fact that it rewards a second look. From far away, you read it as octopus and squid. Up close, you start seeing how carefully the page was built. The differences in body shape, the spacing between the figures, and the repeated curves all begin to matter more. That kind of image deserves a physical life outside a screen.

If you want to see exactly how we prepare our paper, you can read more about how we create our historical parchment replicas.

You can find this print and many others in our Sea Life Art collection.

The making of the original

Part of the appeal here is that the original was made through a real print process, not only drawn by hand and left there. Smithsonian Ocean states that Kunstformen der Natur contains one hundred lithographic prints produced by Adolf Giltsch from Haeckel’s original sketches and watercolors. The Metropolitan Museum identifies a comparable 1904. plate from the same publication as a lithograph, and the Royal Society’s print record for Gamochonia also describes the original as a lithograph.

That matters because lithography suits a page like this. It can hold fine detail, flowing line, and strong tonal contrast without flattening the forms. The result is a plate that feels precise but still fluid.

The symbolism inside the image

The symbolism here is not medieval or religious. It works through visual ideas. Cephalopods are soft, flexible, and hard to pin down in life, yet Haeckel arranges them with total control. The page turns movement into order. It turns creatures that can feel elusive into forms you can study. That tension gives the image much of its strength.

It also explains why Haeckel’s work connected so strongly with later design culture. The Met links Art Nouveau’s “whiplash” curves to studies of plants and deep-sea organisms like Haeckel’s. In Gamochonia, those curves are everywhere, but they are never empty decoration. They come from anatomy. To me, that is the real symbolic charge of the plate. It suggests that nature is not chaotic in any simple sense. It has pattern, pressure, repetition, and grace, even in animals that seem alien at first.

The replica made me notice…

Working with a replica of this image makes the discipline of the original easier to feel. On a screen, it is easy to read Gamochonia as dramatic sea life art and move on. In physical form, the organization becomes much clearer. You notice how the figures are held apart, how the arms echo each other across the page, and how the eye keeps returning to the central sweep of the composition.

That changed the way I see the original. I now read it less as a plate of marine animals and more as a lesson in attention. Haeckel was asking the viewer to slow down, compare, and look carefully.