Purple Emperor and Others Butterfly Vintage 1991 Insect Print M. Harris

A colour print, rescued from a disbound book of Butterfly prints from 1991, with unrelated text on the reverse. Original printing date 1770, this is a reprint.

Suitable for framing, the image size is approx 7.5" x 12" or 19cm x 31cm edge to edge plus small white border.

This is a vintage print not a modern copy and can show signs of age or previous use commensurate with the age of the print. Please view any scan as they form part of the description.

All pictures will be sent bagged and in a board backed envelope for protection in transit.

While every care is taken to ensure my scans or photos accurately represent the item offered for sale, due to differences in monitors and internet pages my pictures may not be an exact match in brightness or contrast to the actual item.

Text taken from the opposite page. Please note this cannot be supplied with the print due to being on the reverse side of the previous print. Any spelling errors are due to the OCR program used.

Purple Emperor and Others
PURPLE EMPEROR (now Purple Emperor, Apatura iris) (second and fourth rows from top) and others. Hand coloured engraving by M. Harris, pl. 9 from Vol. 1 of W.F. Martyn's A New Dictionary of Natural History, 1785.

Most of the plates in this book have been selected from publications which are highly esteemed by those who know and appreciate antiquarian natural history books. A few, however, have come from works known only to the most enthusiastic of entomologists and book collectors. Such is the book from which this plate is taken. It has no scientific value, is printed on cheap paper and is the work of an unknown author, William Frederic Martyn, but the eight plates depicting butterflies and moths were engraved by Moses Harris, author and illustrator of The Aurelian, among the most celebrated of all eighteenth-century entomological publications. This circumstance helps to raise Martyn's book out of an otherwise deserved obscurity.
In his Preface Martyn says, with a verbosity typical of many eighteenth-century encyclopaedists, "The beautiful Delineations from Nature with which the work is at once elucidated and adorned, are all drawn and coloured from actual specimens, by Naturalists of acknowledged reputation, who have visited the Cabinets of the Virtuosi in every part of Europe, and occasionally published their researches; with the invaluable addition of a vast variety of curious Animals, which the indefatigable industry, the consummate skill, and the munificent expence, of SIR ASHTON LEVER, in the establishment of his noble Museum, have enabled us to lay before the public for the first time, from Original Drawings by the most ingenious Artists." Although Sir Ashton Lever's museum in London's Leicester Square was replete with all manner of natural curiosities, including insects, Harris probably drew the Purple Emperor and most of the other butterflies on this plate from specimens in his own collection. It is worth pointing out, perhaps, that the engravings Harris contributed to Martyn's book, though below the standard of those in The Aurelian, are markedly superior to those contributed by the other "ingenious Artists".
The upper of the two engravings of the Purple Emperor shows the male whose wings have a beautiful purple sheen; the wings of the female lack this sheen. The lower of the two engravings is a view of the under side showing the cryptic colouring characteristic of either sex.