Iconotypes: A Compendium of Butterflies & Moths by Richard Vane-Wright

An enhanced facsimile published in partnership with Oxford University Museum of Natural History and sub-titled 'Jones's Icones Complete'. 

A key moment for natural history was the foundation of the Linnean Society of London in 1788. 

The Oxford Museum holds correspondence between William Jones and Sir James Smith discussing the founding of the society, reproduced here, and the Icones themselves, 13 paintings and sketches and almost 1,300 illustrations of butterflies and moths from the seven original volumes, all painted in exceptional detail in colour and at around life size. 

Far more than an Enlightenment curiosity, the paintings were used as the basis for the description of 231 new species in the third volume of the 1793 monograph Entomologia systematica. Fabricius was the leading entomology student of Linnaeus and this monograph greatly expanded the earlier accounts of Lepidoptera species. 

Icones constitutes part of the foundations of butterfly taxonomy and systematics. This early documentation of the global butterfly fauna also carries important messages for conservation biology at a time when repeated studies are showing that global insect abundance has declined by as much as 45% in half a century. In Europe alone, grassland butterflies have experienced a 40% decline in the past 30 years down to habitat loss and chemical pollution. 

Significantly, Icones documents a pre-industrial butterfly world and several of the species illustrated are extinct. The masterpiece is now available together with a reproduction of the original French frontispiece to volume two entitled 'Papiliones Helicon II'. 

We are taken back to those drawers of butterflies, moths and other insects pierced by a pin in large wooden display boxes in museums, but it is the sheer beauty of these botanical plates, page after page in full colour full page together with distribution maps, texts and explanation of the butterfly species from around the world from Africa to Vietnam which will delight. 

With full listing of Jones's Iconotypes, Index of Butterfly Species and To the Article. A Thames & Hudson quality 2021 first edition, satin pagemarker, truly heavyweight at over 2kg and 688 pages, 19 x 26.5cm.