The colouring of John Curtis’s British entomology (1834–1839): Joseph Standish and “the paragon of perfection”

Abstract

The coloured plates in John Curtis’s British entomology (1824–1839) have always received high praise: the work as a whole has been described as “the paragon of perfection”. It is the beauty of the plates which has secured its reputation. Curtis did not colour the plates himself, but employed the professional colourer Joseph Standish (1787–1872). Curtis’s relationship with him was an uneasy one; he never credited him for his contribution and complained bitterly about Standish in his correspondence, blaming him for much of the stress he suffered in bringing out the monthly parts of British entomology. Yet it was Joseph Standish’s great skills as a colourist which made the work a “paragon of perfection” – a phrase used not by Cuvier, to whom it has long been attributed, but by the entomologist Pierre André Latreille.