James Edward Smith / James Sowerby - Lot. of 20 sheets - "English Botany; or, Coloured Figures of British Plants" - 1800

Lot of 20 plates;
Type: Etching;
Support: Heavyweight paper;
Condition: Excellent black-and-white engraving printing with contemporaneous coloring, good state of preservation with slight foxing and browning;
Shipping insured via Bartolini/DPD courier. To take advantage of the insurance coverage, any damage to the item must be reported to the courier at the time of delivery. Otherwise, the insurance reimbursement procedure cannot be activated.

Publisher: J. DAVIS,
And sold by Owner J. SOWERBY

James Sowerby (London, March 21, 1757 – Lambeth, October 25, 1822) was an English illustrator and naturalist.

Illustration of Acer campestre by J. Sowerby
He pursued his passion for the natural sciences, engaging in botany, mineralogy, geology, paleontology, malacology, and mycology, painting hundreds of descriptive plates.

He studied art at the Royal Academy of London and worked with William Curtis, for whose botanical work Flora Londinensis he prepared the illustrations.

Works
Sir James Edward Smith & James Sowerby (1790-1814). English Botany, 36 volumes.
James Sowerby (1796-1815). Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms, 3 volumes.

Sir James Edward Smith (Norwich, December 2, 1759 – March 17, 1828) was an English entomologist and botanist, founder and first president of the Linnean Society of London.

Having taken an early interest in flora and the natural sciences, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh where he was among the students of John Walker.

In 1783 he moved to London. There, the following year, he had the opportunity to save and purchase Linnaeus’s entire Swedish natural history collection, comprising thousands of species of plants, insects and mollusks, as well as documents and books. The publicity of this initiative allowed Smith to gain admission to the Royal Society.

From 1786 he joined the ranks of Grand Tour travelers, visiting botanical gardens, museums and herbaria in the Netherlands, France, Italy and Switzerland. Returning to London in 1788, he founded the Linnean Society there, which he chaired until his death. His library and his botanical collection gained great fame, so much so that they were visited by numerous entomologists and botanists from all over Europe.

Between 1808 and 1819 he wrote over 3,000 botanical articles for the New Cyclopaedia, Abraham Rees’s universal dictionary of the arts and sciences. Among his best-known publications are Flora Britannica and the four volumes of The English Flora published between 1824 and 1828.

Among his entomological writings, the most notable was Natural History of the Rare Insects of Georgia, published in 1797, in which he dealt in particular with the rare species of Lepidoptera present in that American state. Many of his unpublished memoirs were published posthumously in 1832, edited by his wife.