Samuel Howitt

[3] Howitt worked both in oils and water-colours, for the most part confining himself to sporting subjects and illustrations of natural history, which were carefully executed, spirited and truthful.

These, as Howitt represented in his New Work of Animals, were “drawn from the life" and published so as to "assist the pencil of the designer who has not had an opportunity to pay the same attention to this branch of the art”.

Howitt was particularly noted for the illustrations in (Captain) Thomas Williamson's Oriental Field Sports (1807), based on sketches made by the author in India .

Some idea of Howitt’s ingenuity and commercial resourcefulness can be gained from considering his compilation of A New Work of Animals, a series of copper engravings in quarto format “principally designed from the fables of Aesop, Gay and Phaedrus”.

Howitt “has preferred representing most of the animals in fables, as allowing more scope for delineating the expression, the character and the passions,” and he hopes that, by being "studious to attain correctness, he may deserve the approbation of the natural historian" and instruct fellow painters.

For the text of the fables, Howitt had extracted those of Aesop (and Phaedrus) from the prose collection of Samuel Croxall, including his lengthy moralising "applications".

Further evidence of the esteem in which his work continued to be held was the use made of six illustrations as the basis of the Mintons, Hollins set of Aesop's Fables tiles, first issued in 1870, sixty years later.