John O. Westwood Prints
1805–1893 · English · Entomological illustration
John O. Westwood's Cabinet of Oriental Entomology — exotic beetles, butterflies and insects of the East in fine hand-coloured plates. Restored and printed to order.
6 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About John Obadiah Westwood
John Obadiah Westwood was born in Sheffield in December 1805 into a Quaker family, the son of a medal and die maker, and was articled to a solicitor, becoming a partner in a London law firm before abandoning the law for insects and medieval manuscripts. He met the entomologist Frederick William Hope in 1824 and with him founded the Entomological Society of London in 1833; when Hope gave his collections to Oxford, Westwood went with them as curator in 1857 and in 1861 became the university's first Hope Professor of Zoology. He had received the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1855. His books were illustrated with his own drawings, and the hand-coloured plates of Arcana Entomologica of 1841 to 1845 and The Cabinet of Oriental Entomology of 1848, which assembles the birdwing butterflies, giant beetles, mantises and stick insects then arriving from India, China and the East Indies, are among the finest of the Victorian era; An Introduction to the Modern Classification of Insects of 1839 to 1840 and the Thesaurus Entomologicus Oxoniensis of 1874 served science. He was equally distinguished as a palaeographer, publishing facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon and Irish illuminated manuscripts. He died in Oxford in January 1893. The Oriental plates set a few large, brilliantly coloured insects against white, and the restraint is why they frame so handsomely.