Introduction: Undescrib'd: Taylor White (1701–1772) and his collections

In 1734 a young Fellow of the Royal Society, Taylor White, made a proposal to the Council that the dried plants in the Society’s RepositoryMuseum ‘be painted by the hand ofMrVanHuyssen’. Sir Hans Sloane, the President, added his support, and the Council adopted Mr White’s recommendation and charged him with engaging the botanical artist Jacob van Huysum (ca 1687–1740) to depict in watercolour the plants sent from the Chelsea Physic Garden in London. This is the first evidence of an interest in natural history and its representation that would inform the rest of Taylor White’s life and lead him to amass a collection of almost 1500 paintings of plants and animals over the course of the next forty years. Despite his lifelong dedication, Taylor White never succeeded in publishing his collection, nor his speculations on classification of birds and other animals. He is remembered rather for his service to his profession—his coat of arms is executed in stained glass in the chapel at Lincoln’s Inn where he was a Bencher (a senior member)—and his contributions to the Foundling Hospital, where he was Treasurer for twenty-five years. His portrait in pastel by the artist Francis Cotes (1726–1770) hung on the walls of the Hospital as did the grand seascape he commissioned from the maritime painter Charles Brooking (ca 1723–1759). His collection of natural history paintings was not, however, dispersed at his death, unlike the similar collection of his friend the botanist Robert More (1703–1780), which was sold at auction in 1784. The twenty-nine portfolios of paintings commissioned by Taylor White remained with the White family for over 150 years until 1926, when they appeared at auction in London. Here, in the Sotheby’s showroom, the hundreds of brilliantly coloured birds, wide-eyed mammals and intricately patterned fish caught the attention of Dr Casey Wood (1856–1942), founder of the Blacker Wood Library of Ornithology and Zoology at McGill University in Montreal. Wood attended the June 1926 sale of ‘Valuable Printed Books, Illuminated Manuscripts and Miniatures, Autograph Letters and Historical Documents’, but according to the handwritten notes on the British Library’s copy of the sale Catalogue, Wood bought only a few small items. On the third day of the sale, however, he was impressed by Lot 657A. The lot was described as ‘A Magnificent Collection of Fourteen Hundred and Sixty-Two Original Water-Colour Drawings of Natural History Subjects’. This lot comprised nearly 500 botanical drawings by Jacob van Huysum and Georg Ehret (1708–1770) and over 900 watercolours