Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.8500
    Looking for a special gift? Buy a print of this image.

    Turret nests of termites

    Date
    ca. 1781
    Creator
    Henry Smeathman (1742 - 1786, British) , Naturalist
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (painting): 232mm
    width (painting): 292mm
    Subject
    Content object
    nature
       > animal
          > insect
    Description
    View of “turret nests” of termites (identified by Smeathman as Termes mordax and Termes atrox) in grassland, with a key to the figures below.

    An inset figure, showing a European stooping over a smaller scale version of the same scene with a measuring rod, was not used in the printed plate. This figure tentatively identified as a portrait of Henry Smeathman in the essay “Imagining the tropical colony: Henry Smeathman and the termites of Sierra Leone” by Starr Douglas and Felix Driver (2005). A faint pencil inscription above this reads: “This group and figure not to be engraved”. Headed “Drawing 6”. Signed upper left “Hen: Smeathman, del”.

    Plate 9 figures 1-6 and one unused figure from the paper “Some account of the termites, which are found in Africa and other hot climates”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society vol.71 part 1 1781 pp.139-192.

    Henry Smeathman (1742–1786) English naturalist, known for his work in entomology and colonial settlement in Sierra Leone.

    In 1771 Quaker Physician John Fothergill, along with two other members of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks and Marmaduke Tunstall, sponsored Smeathman to spend four years in and around the Sierra Leone peninsula studying its natural history, specifically its insects. His research relied heavily on individuals involved in slave-trading networks for support and assistance.
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Africa
    <The World>
       > Africa
          > Sierra Leone
    Powered by CollectionsIndex+/CollectionsOnline