Margaret Fountaine

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Margaret Fountaine, 1886

Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine (born May 16, 1862 Norwich , † April 21, 1940 Trinidad ) was a British butterfly artist and illustrator of the Victorian era .

Life

Illustration from 1931

Margaret Fountaine was the eldest of seven children of John Fountaine, a pastor, and his wife Mary Isabella Lee. She was a masterly illustrator of botanical subjects and had gained an excellent knowledge of butterflies on countless trips through Europe , the Middle East , East and West Africa , India , Tibet , USA , Australia , New Zealand and the West Indies .

Margaret Fountaine became an expert on butterflies on her travels; She raised many of the butterflies in her collection from eggs or caterpillars . 22,000 copies are housed in the Norwich Castle Museum and are known as the Fountaine-Neimy Collection . Her sketchbooks, which give a detailed account of the life cycle and individual stages of development of the butterflies, are kept in the Natural History Museum in London .

In the early 1880s, at the age of 21, she fell passionately in love with Septimus Hewson, an Irish chorister at Norwich Cathedral . She held onto this love permanently for the next seven years. When Hewson was fired from his job for drunkenness and left Norwich due to debt, she followed him to Ireland . Margaret Fountaine thought she was engaged. Hewson saw it differently, however; the marriage was not consummated. The contact ended in 1890. At 27, she became financially independent from her family through an inheritance. In 1895 she began to visit the botanist and entomologist Henry John Elwes (1846–1922) and was inspired by his work to set up a collection herself and to undertake a first collector's trip to Sicily .

Enthusiastic about the development of the modern bicycle , she went on a bike tour through France in 1897 and a year later, together with her sister, a bike tour through Italy , on which she always expanded her collection.

In 1898 she was elected a member of the Royal Entomological Society of London . Fountaine also published a large number of her study results in specialist journals.

In 1901 Margaret Fountaine visited Damascus for the first time , where she met Khalil Neimy (1877–1928) and hired him as a translator and guide. With Neimy, she was connected to a 27-year-old work and travel community that took her all over the world in search of butterflies.

In 1912 Fountaine took part in the Second International Congress of Entomology in Oxford with Neimy .

In 1940 Margaret Fountaine - 78 years old - died of a heart attack. She was just collecting on Mount St. Benedict in Trinidad and was buried in an unmarked grave in Trinidad.

Margaret Fountaine left behind several volumes of diaries, beginning at the age of 16, which, according to her will, could not be published until 1978, 100 years after her first entry. A passionate female biography in the Victorian era was created on over 3000 pages. Each of the twelve volumes begins on April 15 and a photograph of herself and describes her love for travel and butterflies, but also the social difficulties that this enthusiasm brought with it.

Works (selection)

  • 862 original water-color drawings of Lepidoptera larvae and pupae with their food plants, 1907-1939 .
  • Love Among the Butterflies: Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady. Little, Brown and Company, Boston 1980
  • Butterflies and Late Loves: The Further Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady. Collins, 1986

literature

  • Literature by and about Margaret Fountaine in the catalog of the German National Library
  • Natascha Scott Stokes: Wild and Fearless: The Life of Margaret Fountaine. Peter Owen Ltd., 2006
  • Harriet Blodgett: Preserving the Moment in the Diary of Margaret Fountaine. In: Suzanne L. Bunkers; Cynthia Anne Huff (ed.): Inscribing the daily: critical essays on women's diaries. University of Massachusetts Press, 1996
  • Tony Irwin: Of butterflies and broken hearts ... Of bishops, bugs and things. Antenna; vol. 2, no.3, 1978
  • Michael A. Salmon; Peter Marren; Basil Harley: The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors. University of California Press, 2001

Web links

Commons : Margaret Fountaine  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e FOUNTAINE, MARGARET (1862-1940) ; Biography in: Jennifer Speake: Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia . Routledge. London and New York 2003, page 457. ISBN 978-1-579-58257-0 .
  2. ↑ a b 'Wild and Fearless': the first biography of Margaret Fountaine ; Review of Natasha Scott-Strokes' biography on January 12, 2007. Retrieved October 13, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Fountaine, Margaret
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fountaine, Margaret Elizabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British butterfly researcher
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Norwich
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1940
Place of death Trinidad