One Man, Fifty Thousand Butterflies: A Love Story

Obsession drives people to incredible lengths. The fruit of one such monomaniac fixation is Sherman Foote Denton’s (1856–1937) As Nature Shows Them (1900), a two-volume work on native butterflies and moths, each copy illustrated with unique impressions taken directly from the wings of specimens collected by the author.

Denton had an unusual upbringing. His father William, a well-known geologist and travelling lecturer, claimed that his son’s uncanny talent for drawing birds derived from his psychic abilities. Supernatural or not, Sherman’s prowess won him contracts from the US Fish Commission as an artist, but he transferred his operations as soon as possible to lepidoptery. As well as collecting and illustrating butterflies and moths, he and his brothers ran a business in Wellesley, Massachusetts selling lepidopterists’ supplies and his own patented butterfly mounting system. After his death, the road on which he lived was renamed Denton Street, and his precious collection of 14,000 specimens was donated to the Wellesley Historical Society. That devoted lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov visited the collection in 1941 and commented on the ‘marvellous specimens’.

Several equally marvellous specimens appear in the present work, As Nature Shows Them. Denton devised a laborious transfer process in which butterfly wings were pressed between prepared sheets of paper coated with adhesive and gum Arabic. When separated, the scales remained impressed in the sheet, producing remarkably vivid and iridescent images of the original insects. The bodies and antennae were completed from engraved outlines and finished by hand.

Denton, unsurprisingly, was unable to persuade anyone to help him in this enterprise. Every copy required a fresh set of butterflies, meaning that the edition of 500 copies consumed well over 50,000 specimens, all prepared by Denton himself after he failed to persuade assistants to undertake the work. As a result, every plate is technically unique. Simultaneously scientific document, artistic experiment, and monument to obsessive craftsmanship, the work remains entirely without parallel in the history of natural history illustration.