Benjamin Wilkes (died c. 1749) was an 18th-century
artist
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...
and
naturalist
Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is cal ...
in
London
London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
. Wilkes' profession was 'painting of History Pieces and Portraits in Oyl'. When a friend invited him to a meeting of the
Aurelian Society, where he first saw specimens of butterflies and moths, he became convinced that nature would be his 'best instructor' as to colour and form in art. He began to study
entomology
Entomology (from Ancient Greek ἔντομον (''éntomon''), meaning "insect", and -logy from λόγος (''lógos''), meaning "study") is the branch of zoology that focuses on insects. Those who study entomology are known as entomologists. In ...
spending his leisure time collecting, studying and drawing the adults,
larva
A larva (; : larvae ) is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into their next life stage. Animals with indirect development such as insects, some arachnids, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase ...
e,
pupae
A pupa (; : pupae) is the life stage of some insects undergoing transformation between immature and mature stages. Insects that go through a pupal stage are holometabolous: they go through four distinct stages in their life cycle, the stages th ...
and
parasitoids
In evolutionary ecology, a parasitoid is an organism that lives in close association with its host (biology), host at the host's expense, eventually resulting in the death of the host. Parasitoidism is one of six major evolutionarily stable str ...
(
Tachinidae
The Tachinidae are a large and variable family of true fly, flies within the insect order Fly, Diptera, with more than 8,200 known species and many more to be discovered. Over 1,300 species have been described in North America alone. Insects in t ...
and
Ichneumonidae
The Ichneumonidae, also known as ichneumon wasps, ichneumonid wasps, ichneumonids, or Darwin wasps, are a family of parasitoid wasps of the insect order Hymenoptera. They are one of the most diverse groups within the Hymenoptera with roughly 25 ...
) of
Lepidoptera
Lepidoptera ( ) or lepidopterans is an order (biology), order of winged insects which includes butterflies and moths. About 180,000 species of the Lepidoptera have been described, representing 10% of the total described species of living organ ...
, assisted by the collector Mr.
Joseph Dandridge
Joseph Dandridge (January 1665 Winslow, Buckinghamshire – 23 December 1747 London), was an English silk-pattern designer of Huguenot descent, a natural history illustrator, an amateur naturalist specialising in entomology, and a leading figure i ...
. Wilkes' own collection was kept, "against the Horn Tavern in Fleet Street," London, "Where any gentleman or lady," could see his collection of insects. Henry Baker, writing in August 1749, stated that Wilkes had, "died of a fever in about a week after he had finished his laborious and elegant work," and paid tribute to Wilkes as, "indefatigable in his observations and faithful in minuting down every particular but for want of learning quite incapable of writing a book."
Works
* 1742 ''Twelve new designs of English butterflies''. This rare work consisted solely of twelve engraved plates each depicting geometric arrangements of both butterflies and moths. It depicts seven
hawkmoths. The captions to each provide information on the time of emergence, host plants and occurrence of the caterpillar.
* 1749
English moths and butterflies'. More ambitious, this work ran to three editions, the last of which incorporated Linnaean nomenclature and was published in 1824.
See also
*
Aurelian
Aurelian (; ; 9 September ) was a Roman emperor who reigned from 270 to 275 AD during the Crisis of the Third Century. As emperor, he won an unprecedented series of military victories which reunited the Roman Empire after it had nearly disinte ...
References
External links
Online version of The English Moths and Butterflies from GDZ
* Online version of The English Moths and Butterflies from Project Gutenberg.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilkes, Benjamin
English entomologists
Year of birth unknown
Year of death unknown