Arthur Stannard Vernay
Arthur Stannard Vernay (11 May 1877 - 25 October 1960) was a noted English-born American art and antiques dealer, decorator, big game hunter and naturalist explorer. He sponsored numerous expeditions across the world to collect biological specimens and cultural artefacts.
Born in Weymouth, England, Vernay (probably an assumed surname) immigrated to New York early in the twentieth century, and found a job as an elevator operator at a furniture store known as A.J. Crawfords. After working there briefly, Vernay started his own shop in 1906, called Arthur S. Vernay, Inc. and located at 1 East 45th Street, near Madison Avenue. There he sold antiques and decorative arts to a number of important and influential New Yorkers including Ogden Codman, Jr., Elsie de Wolfe, Sir Charles Carrick Allom, Consuelo Vanderbilt, Francis Patrick Garvan, Benjamin Altman, Solomon R. Guggenheim, William Russell Grace, as well as leading art dealerships such as M Knoedler & Co, and the design firm Tiffany Studios.[1]
In the 1920s, Vernay grew increasingly interested in game hunting and naturalist exploration. In 1921 he stayed at the Biligirirangans with Ralph Camroux Morris and saw wild animals in nature for the first time. He paid for a collecting expedition led by Colonel John Champion Faunthorpe intended to enhance the American Museum of Natural History's collection of Southeast Asian animals, Vernay joined Faunthorpe into India in 1923. Eventually this expedition would culminate in the American Museum of Natural History's Vernay-Faunthorpe Hall of South Asiatic Mammals, which opened in 1930 and held mounted elephants shot by the collectors in Mysore.[2] He was elected Vice Patron of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1928. In 1935 he became a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History and in the same year he accompanied Charles Suydam Cutting to Tibet where they met the Dalai Lama. His last expedition was to Africa in 1946. Around the same time he became very interested in orchids.[3]
Vernay later moved to Nassau, Bahamas, where he cultivated an orchid greenhouse, collected species from South America, participated in environmental conservation efforts, co-founding the Bahamas National Trust and the Society for the Preservation of the Flamingo. In the Bahamas, Vernay lived with his wife Marion Kelley (married 1908) at their home, Los Cayos, and was part of an expatriate social community that included the Duke of Windsor and Duchess of Windsor, the Swedish entrepreneur Axel Wenner-Gren, and hosted the English author Ian Fleming when he visited the Bahamas in 1956 before writing both Dr. No and Thunderball. Fleming accompanied Vernay and Robert Cushman Murphy along with his friend and OSS agent Ivar Felix Bryce, to Inagua which had the largest flamingo colony in the world.
Several species collected on his expeditions have been named after him including the rodent genus Vernaya[4] and the Angolan file snake, Mehelya vernayi.[5]
Expeditions
The major expeditions sponsored by Vernay include:
- Faunthorpe-Vernay Expedition to India, 1923
- Vernay-Angola Expedition, 1925
- Vernay-Archbold Expedition to Madagascar, 1929
- Vernay Scientific Survey of the Eastern Ghats (with collectors V.S. LaPersonne and N.A. Baptista), 1929
- Vernay-Lang Kalahari Expedition, 1930-31
- Vernay-Hopwood Upper Chindwin expedition, 1935 (S.F. Hopwood was the chief conservator of forests in Burma)
- Vernay-Cutting Burma Expedition, 1938-39 (with Charles Suydam Cutting)[6]
- Vernay Nyasaland Expedition, 1946
References
- ^ "The Business Papers of Arthur S. Vernay, Inc". The Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
- ^ Osborn, HF (1942). Proboscidea. Volume 2. New York: AMNH. p. 1311.
- ^ Morris, R.C. (1961). "Obituary. Arthur Stannard Vernay". Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. 58: 249–250.
- ^ Lunde, DP (2007). "MAMMALIAN SPECIES: Vernaya fulva" (PDF). 806: 1–3.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help)[dead link] - ^ Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5. ("Vernay", p. 274).
- ^ Ward, F. Kingdon (1941). "The Vernay-Cutting Expedition, November, 1938, to April, 1939: Report on the Vegetation and Flora of the Hpimaw and Htawgaw Hills, Northern Burma". Brittonia. 4 (1): 1. doi:10.2307/2804984.