Natural History Illustrations
Kirklees Museums’ collections include natural history illustrations covering a range of subjects. These beautiful studies were produced by late 19th and early 20th Century naturalists Seth Lister Mosley and Thomas Gibbs.
Seth Lister Mosley (1848-1929) inherited a love of nature and the skill of taxidermy from his father, which led him to become a keen collector, artist and writer. He ran his own museum at his home in Beaumont Park, Huddersfield, gaining experience at the Huddersfield Technical College’s museum, and at Cliffe Castle in Keighley before becoming the first curator at Huddersfield’s Tolson Memorial Museum in 1922. Moving from his early ‘egging’, shooting and stuffing days, he developed the educational use of illustrations. The settings for the specimens in the Bird Room at Tolson are all his work, and he produced series of postcards (printed on his own press, then hand-coloured). His published work includes The Birds of Huddersfield (1915), which is thought to be the first book on the birds of a local area to include distribution maps.
Thomas Gibbs (1865-1919) was born in Burton-on-Trent, and died in Lindfield in Sussex. His association with the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union began in 1898, around the time when he was living in Sheffield. As well as being a solicitor by profession, he was a proficient botanist with a particular interest in fungi. He was especially interested in the fungi which grow on dung as part of the natural recycling process. The ink-cap Coprinus gibbsii was named in his honour, although this name is now ‘sunk’ within another toadstool species name; another dung-inhabiting species, Coprinus cordisporus, was named by Gibbs himself.
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