An analysis of information preserved in a recently identified collection of insect drawings by Alexander Marshall (1639?–1682)
| Autor: | James A. Mears |
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| Rok vydání: | 1981 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Archives of Natural History. 1981:87-94 |
| ISSN: | 1755-6260 0260-9541 |
| DOI: | 10.3366/anh.1981.013 |
| Popis: | Alexander Marshall's high reputation for botanical illustration (Edwards, 1964) was established by John Tradescant, the younger, referring to an item in Tradescant's Museum: "A Book of Mr. Tradescant's choicest Flowers and Plants, exquisitely limned in vellum by Mr. Alex Marshall" (Tradescant, 1656). But John Evelyn's statement (Evelyn, 1955) for 1 August 1682, "Thence to Fulham to visit the Bish of London, and review again the additions which Mr. Marshall had made of his curious book of flowers in miniature and collection of insects", suggests that Marshall (or Compton) had a collection of insects or insect drawings, as well as botanical illustrations. Since Evelyn's note, however, Marshall has been known only as an illustrator of flowers and plants (Blunt, 1951), on the basis of two collections: the Tradescant flower and plant drawings, apparently part of the Ashmolean collections at one time, and the flower paintings now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle (formerly in the possession of the Friend family) 1. Now Alexander Marshall's expertise in the illustration of insects can again be judged, for there are watercolors of insects by Marshall bound in an album preserved at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The motivations of a master illustrator and the enthusiasm of an acute observer of nature and of men are demonstrated in the annotations associated with the insect drawings, valuable additions to the meager information heretofore available about Alexander Marshall. The purposes of this paper are to announce the identification of the Marshall insect drawings and to present some of the information associated with the drawings. In 1928, Roswell C. Williams, Jr, deposited with the American Entomological Society, whose library is an integral part of the Library of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, an album of insect drawings said to have been purchased from a London bookseller within the previous ten years. The album had been sold as a collection of Petiver's insect drawings (Phillips and Phillips, 1963). The red leather album contains more than 150 watercolor drawings of insects, five drawings of insects with plants and one drawing of a guinea pig. There are natural history observations and other annotations in at least four hands, some clearly applied after the assembly of all the drawings. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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