An Exposition of English Insects: Including the several Classes of Neuroptera, Hymenoptera, & Diptera, or Bees, Flies, & Libellulae

Description:

2nd edition. In this copy the English title-page is dated 1782, but the French title page, 1786; the allegorical frontispiece is not present, but the colour chart is. The first issue of the 2nd edition usually has the frontispiece, but not the colour chart, and the second issue of 1786 usually has the colour chart substituted for the frontispiece.

Moses Harris (1730-c.1788) was a leading entomologist and one of the finest natural history artists of the eighteenth-century. Harris was a significant follower of Isaac Newton’s seminal work on light and colour, Opticks (1704). Harris produced the first comprehensive system of colours that was applicable to painting, producing the first colour circle in his short but highly influential work ‘The Natural System of Colours’ published sometime between 1769 and 1776. The first edition was dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy.

The colour chart in the ‘Exposition’ is entitled ‘Scheme of Colours’ and is accompanied by an explanatory list of seventy-two colours. This is a further development of Harris’s colour circle, this time applying his ideas to entomological illustration. In the Preface, Harris explains that he included the colour wheel ‘to assist the conception of the reader and to give some idea of each [colour] meant by the catalogue’.

The ‘Exposition’ includes seven beautiful plates of dragonflies. Moses Harris is best known to odonatologists for his description of the Banded Demoiselle, Calopteryx splendens, in this work. As stated by A.G. Orr and M. Hamalainen (Agrion 18, 2014) this was ‘the first of only four dragonfly species currently recognised to have been described originally from the British Isles and certainly one of the most beautiful of European odonates’. They also note that apart from Thomas Mouffet’s (1634) black and white illustrations of two dragonflies ‘Harris was the first English author to illustrate dragonflies at the species level’. The fact that Harris perfectly depicts the natural colours of the eyes of the ‘Large brown’ now known as Aeshna grandis and ‘Large green’ Aeshna cyanea indicates that Harris examined living individuals and ‘either coloured the printed copper plates himself or supervised the colourists’.

Condition

4to, full calf, cont. boards, gilt tooling to borders, marbled endpapers. Some scuffing, mild wear to lower edge of front board. Recently rebacked in a sympathetic style, gilt tooling to spine, leather title piece. A fine, clean and attractive copy.