ALBIN, Eleazar; W. DERHAM. A Natural History of English Insects. Illustrated with a Hundred Copper Plates, Curiously Engraven from the Life: and (for Those who Desire it) exactly Coloured by the Author …

‘One of the First Beautiful Books of Natural History’

ALBIN, Eleazar; W. DERHAM. A Natural History of English Insects. Illustrated with a Hundred Copper Plates, Curiously Engraven from the Life: and (for Those who Desire it) exactly Coloured by the Author … London: [William Bowyer for] John and William Innys. 1749.

4to. Contemporary mottled calf, large gilt dentelle borders, central gilt floral lozenge incorporating two pairs of birds, spine richly gilt in compartments with central dove tools, board edges and turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt to a floral design, red sprinkled edges; π2 A–N4 O2, with 100 hand-coloured copper-engraved plates after Albin, plate 84 heightened with gold, each dedicated to a subscriber at foot and with facing letterpress description, lacking the 26-page section to the rear containing ‘[William] Derham’s Notes on Mr. Albin’s History of English Insects’ (as usual), bound with the title-page and dedication to the 1724 edition (see below); endcaps chipped, corners a trifle bumped; subtle early marginal repair to plates 19, 71, and 72 verso, occasional light offsetting from plates but very good; 16 pp. manuscript notes in nineteenth-century hand loosely laid in (see below).

Fifth edition, one of 150 copies, with 100 hand-coloured plates each dedicated to an individual subscriber, commissioned by botanist and gardener, Mary Somerset.

First published in 1720, this work, ‘one of the first beautiful books of natural history’ (Brunet, trans.), was the first English book on lepidoptera to be illustrated with colour plates. Each plate was engraved from drawings by English naturalist Eleazar Albin (c. 1680–1741/2), a figure about whom relatively little is known outside his own account in the work’s preface. He is generally understood to have been a professional drawing master and watercolourist who turned to natural history illustration around 1709, developing an association with the silk-weaver and naturalist Joseph Dandridge and gaining a particular reputation for his entomological paintings.

The project was initially undertaken under the patronage of horticultural virtuoso Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort (1630–1715), and continued after her death with the support of over 150 subscribers, including aristocratic patrons and prominent figures in the scientific community such as Hans Sloane. Each plate is dedicated to an individual subscriber, among them Caroline of Ansbach as Princess of Wales, later Queen Caroline of Great Britain (1683–1737), to whom the work as a whole is dedicated, Mary Somerset, and Elizabeth Brudenell, Countess of Cardigan (1689–1745). Nearly forty percent of the original subscribers were women, a reminder that lepidoptery was among the few early scientific fields in which women played a significant role: ‘the first collectors of entomology were women of high social standing’ (Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy (2000)).

Albin’s initial interest in his insect subjects lay in the aesthetic appeal of their ‘various Forms and beautiful Colours’ (preface). He regarded it as his duty to portray the creatures ‘exactly after the Life; having observed it as a great Fault in those who have gone before me in this Way, that they either did not look often enough at their Pattern, or affected to make the Picture outdo Nature’. He also became a serious and diligent observer of insect behaviour, confident enough to refute current theories that butterflies were born from the plants that nurtured them but came from ‘Animal Parents of the same Species’. His work, illustrating the insects in their various life-stages feeding on plants, is clearly influenced by Maria Sibylla Merian but has a distinctive vibrancy of its own.

The text was continuously edited and reprinted by various booksellers throughout the eighteenth century, often featuring expanded observational notes by the theologian and natural philosopher William Derham (1657–1735), the first person to measure accurately the speed of sound. For the present edition ‘the entire text [was] reset and a number of errors corrected’ (Lisney). In our copy, the title-page and dedication leaf from the 1724 second edition are bound in before the 1749 title-page.

Provenance: Loosely laid into our copy are manuscript notes in French, datable to 1877, including one written on the verso of the wedding invitation of Alexandre Robert François, comte du Barry de Merval (1845–1881), conseiller général de la Seine-Inférieure, and Marie Julie Henriette Arnois de Captot (1857–1937). The unidentified author was evidently an attentive student of entomological literature. The notes constitute a detailed index to the plates, identifying and describing the individual figures represented and supplying extensive bibliographical cross-references to a range of leading eighteenth-century entomological works, including Jacques Louis Engramelle, Jacob Christian Schäffer, Moses Harris, August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, Carl Linnaeus, and Eugenius Johann Christoph Esper.

ESTC T85943 (‘Printed by William Bowyer; his records show 150 copies printed’); Brunet I, col. 142 (‘one of the first fine natural history books with colour plates’, trans.’); Lisney 123; Nissen 58.

SKU: 2125138