Georgy Jacobson Prints

About Georgiy Jacobson

Georgiy Georgievich Jacobson was born in Saint Petersburg in 1871 and graduated from the physics and mathematics faculty of the city's university in 1893. He spent his career at the Zoological Museum of the Academy of Sciences, which sent him on collecting expeditions across the Russian Empire, and became the leading specialist of his generation on the leaf beetles, the Chrysomelidae, and on the systematics and distribution of beetles in general. His monument is Zhuki Rossii i Zapadnoi Evropy, Beetles of Russia, Western Europe and Neighbouring Countries, a handbook of more than nine hundred pages covering over two thousand species, issued in parts by the publisher Devrien in Saint Petersburg from 1905; the eleventh and final part appeared in 1915, and the work was never completed. Its colour plates, lithographed in Germany, set ranks of beetles side by side at natural size, ground beetles, longhorns, weevils, stag beetles and jewel beetles, every elytron, antenna and leg drawn with a taxonomist's exactness and the metallic greens, bronzes and blues printed with unusual fidelity. He died in November 1926. The plates have the orderly beauty of a collection drawer, which is exactly how they hang: a hundred small, perfect forms arranged in rows.