Nicholas Marcellus Hentz Spider paintings, 1820-1840
Content Description
Collection of 209 watercolors of created by Nicholas Marcellus Hentz. 209 paintings : watercolor on paper ; 13 x 10 cm. + notes (19 leaves, 32 x 10 cm.)
Colored drawings accompanied by commentary, mostly in English but some in French. Many are numbered, the highest number being 239.
The paintings have been digitized and added to the Research Library's Digital Special Collections.
Dates
- 1820-1840
Biographical / Historical
Nicholas Marcellus Hentz (1797-1856) was born in France and came to America with his family in 1816. He had some medical training in France and was a skilled painter of miniatures. In America he taught French and lived in the Boston area and eventually down into various parts of the South where he became a field naturalist and an insect collector. In the 1840's he sold his extensive specimen collection to the Boston Society of Natural History. He is best remembered for his descriptions of 141 species of spiders which are illustrated with these watercolors and published in the society's journal between 1842-1850.
Extent
209 Painting (2 bound items housed in a single box) ; watercolor on paper ; 13 x 10 cm. + notes (19 leaves, 32 x 10 cm.)
Language of Materials
English
Custodial History
Originally a gift from Mrs. D.F.P. (Charity) Cole (Hentz's great-great-granddaughter) to the Museum in 1970 through John Cooke who was an AMNH Curator of Entomology.
The 1996 Natural History article, A Pioneering Spider Man, goes into further detail of the collection's history.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Transferred by Lou Sorkin and Norm Platnick of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology.
General
Art Survey no. 86
- Title
- Nicholas Marcellus Hentz Spider paintings, 1820-1840
- Author
- Rebecca Morgan
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- Undetermined
- Script of description
- Code for undetermined script
- Language of description note
- English
- Related article published in Natural History Magazine: A Pioneering Spider Man, Cooke, John – pg.74, Natural History, 1996, v. 105
- The illustrations were used in: Descriptions and figures of the Araneides of the United States. (Journal of the Boston Society of Natural History, v. 4, no. 1 (Jan. 1842)-v. 6 (1857)
- The illustrations were used in: The spiders of the United States: a collection of the arachnological writings of Nicholas Marcellus Hentz / edited by Edward Burgess. 1875. (Occasional papers of the Boston Society of Natural History, v. 2)
Repository Details
Part of the Museum Archives at the Gottesman Research Library Repository
American Museum of Natural History
200 Central Park West
New York NY 10024 USA
(212) 769-5420
[email protected]
