Isaac Sprague, “delineator and naturalist”

In naming the genus Spraguea, John Torrey, America's major botanist of the first half of the nineteenth century, wrote in 1853: "I have dedicated this genus to Mr. Isaac Sprague, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, so well known as a draughtsman and especially for the admirable illustrations of the Genera of Plants of the United States...." l Sprague (Fig. 1), the major botanical illustrator in this country at that time, had few competitors. He considered himself a "naturalist" and "delineator,"2 rather than a botanical artist. By providing accurate and artistically pleasing drawings for some of their books and papers, mostly between 1845 and 1865, he helped both John Torrey and Asa Gray to become accepted as worldclass botanists, on a par with those botanists of Britain and the Continent who were then publishing finely illustrated works. Thus, Sprague's work was most important to American botany at a critical point in its development. In the early nineteenth century in the United States, there was little original illustration of scientific works. To understand the rise of the new American tradition of original scientific illustration, it is particularly important to consider its leading early exemplar, Isaac Sprague, and to relate his story to that of the development of botany as a profession, as exemplified in the life of Sprague's major employer, Asa Gray. In our own time, Sprague has been largely forgotten. In Wilfrid