Loving Insects John Abbot's Drawings and Natural History Collecting in the Atlantic World, 1760s-1840s

About this book

The life and work of an overlooked early American artist, naturalist, and specimen hunter.

John Abbot’s love of insects manifested itself in his exquisite watercolour drawings of butterflies, moths, beetles, cicadas, dragonflies, wasps, and spiders. Considered one of the finest illustrated entomological publications of its era, The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia combined those watercolours with Abbot’s terse notes that described his encounters with these creatures. Born in London in 1751, Abbot journeyed to the American South in 1773 to collect and draw insects and birds for natural history collectors in Britain. Although he had had ambitions as a young man to join the ranks of London’s natural history illustrators, he never returned to Britain. Instead, Abbot lived most of his long life in Georgia, where he made thousands of watercolour drawings of insects and supplied thousands of insect specimens to his British, European, and American clients. Despite his accomplishments as a naturalist and an artist, he is little known today. Loving Insects aims to rectify this omission by detailing Abbot’s activities as a natural history artist, a specimen hunter, and a naturalist and by claiming a space for him as a major figure in the history of early American natural history.

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Biography

Beth Fowkes Tobin is professor emerita of English and women's studies at the University of Georgia. She is the author and/or editor of several books, including The Duchess's Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook's Voyages and two award-winning books, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting and Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1830. She lives and writes in Chicago.