Date Note | Earliest possible date, publication date |
Administrative History | The drawing is probably one of the series which was removed from sheet LDGSL/613/5/64/3 by William Willoughby Cole, 3rd Earl of Enniskillen in 1849 (see Council Minutes, 2 May 1849).
Lifelong friends and palaeontologists, Sir Phillip Egerton and Enniskillen had agreed to help defray the costs of Agassiz's work by paying for the artists' time (and therefore the drawings themselves) on the understanding that they would become their property once the images were copied onto lithographic stones.
Although the Egerton and Enniskillen drawings were supposed to revert back to the ownership of the two patrons, there were (and are still) a number of images from their collections in the other series connected with Agassiz's fossil fish works. Enniskillen was granted permission by Council to remove them (see above). Egerton and Enniskillen bequeathed their sets of drawings back to the Society to reunite the collection. |