He grew up in a fashionable London neighborhood of Bennet Street, St. James, and spent part of his time at his family's country house.

[3] The Russian naturalist Andrey Avinoff, an accomplished artist himself, described Abbot's work as "among the masterpieces of entomological portraiture".

[4][5] Sometime after 1767, Bonneau used his connections to introduce his talented student to Dru Drury, a wealthy naturalist and owner of one of the best insect collections in England.

[6] Drury and other members of the Royal Society recognized his talent as an illustrator and encouraged him to go to America to collect insects.

He made arrangements with Thomas Martyn and John Francillon, both naturalists and dealers in natural history collections, to purchase whatever specimens he might ship back to London.

The diversity and number of insects in Virginia did not meet his expectations and two of his first three shipments back to London were lost at sea.

Instead he decided to join members of the Goodall family and head down to Georgia where he hoped to avoid the upcoming war and find better opportunities for collecting specimens.

When he arrived in Georgia, he again stayed with the Goodall family in a log cabin constructed about 100 miles south of Augusta.

Abbot became a successful planter and lived with his family in a large and comfortable house in Burke County.

It was the first major work on North American insects and contained 104 etchings of watercolors of species that Abbot had collected.

The only publication to bear his name was The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia, whose primary author was James Edward Smith.

From 1829 to 1837, renowned French entomologist Jean Baptiste Boisduval and wealthy American naturalist John Eatton Le Conte published installments of Histoire Générale et Iconographie des Lépidoptères et des Chenilles de l'Amérique Septentrionale.