The Travails of Traveling Natural History Artists

This paper explores the material conditions under which two English artists, John Abbot and John William Lewin, produced magnificent entomological drawings in foreign settings. In the 1770s Abbot travelled to southeastern backwoods of North America and Lewin travelled in the 1790s to Australia. Although Abbot and Lewin did not know each other, their stories are joined by their association with Dru Drury, a jeweler and amateur entomologist, who sponsored both artists’ journeys. These artists worked in difficult conditions, including rugged terrain, political instability, illness, isolation, and the scarcity of art supplies, all of which put stress on their job of depicting as accurately as possible arthropods found in remote and exotic locales. Even small annoying things like flies eating the paint off watercolor drawings disrupted the art-making process. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to producing entomological drawings was the necessity of building an extensive insect collection. Lewin and Abbot had to become specimen hunters as well as accomplished artists and field naturalists. Both Abbot and Lewin were ambitious and planned to return to London to publish their drawings as illustrated natural history books, following the tradition established by Maria Sibylla Merian and Mark Catesby. However, neither artist returned to Britain, and their paths to publication turned out to be much more difficult than they had expected. This paper describes how these artists produced art in British imperial outposts and how this artwork fared as it travelled through global networks of exchange.