John Abbot and William Swainson

Janice Neri (1970–2016) was professor of art history at Boise State University. She was author of The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700.Tara Nummedal is associate professor of history and Italian studies at Brown University. She is author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire and Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany.John V. Calhoun is a research associate at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity in Gainesville, Florida. He is coauthor of Butterflies through Binoculars: A Field, Finding, and Gardening Guide to Butterflies in Florida.

“This beautifully illustrated work represents the 19th-century collaboration between two artist-naturalists, John Abbot (1751–c.1840) and William Swainson (1789–1855). This complete set of Abbot’s original, full-color drawings includes beetles, grasshoppers, butterflies, and moths. It should delight naturalists, artists, and historians of science.”- CHOICE;“I believe this work, by including reproductions of 104 drawings, will add substantively to the limited information available to the public about Abbot and his devotion to entomology during the early part of the ‘golden age’ of natural history.”- Gary R. Mullen, coeditor of Philip Henry Gosse’s Letters from Alabama: Chiefly Relating to Natural History;“A panoply of winged insects comes brilliantly to life in Janice Neri’s studious account of John Abbott’s never-before-published entomological drawings. Their global journey—from the tidewaters of Georgia to the windy shores of Wellington—reveals a naturalist’s world that is as interconnected as it is fragile and fleeting, like the delicate wings of a rare butterfly, observed for a moment until it flies away.”- Neil Safier, director and librarian, John Carter Brown Library;“Janice Neri’s keen eye for beautiful images that illuminate the entwinement of art and science is alive in this analysis of a much-traveled and hitherto unstudied set of watercolors. These images depict some of the most perplexing subjects of natural history—the life cycles and metamorphoses of insects, matters at the heart of the study of nature for centuries. Her sensitive historical account of the people and places that gave rise to this investigation and produced these images takes us back to a time when natural history could be a business, a mark of gentility and status, and a type of knowledge that promised an escape from such human structures. Thanks to Nummedal and Calhoun, Neri’s voice emerges loud and clear from this intelligent and informative account.”- Pamela H. Smith, author of The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire and The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution