HOWITT, Samuel (British, 1765-1822).
Wolverine.
Watercolor and graphite on paper.
Inscribed ‘Wolverine’ lower center.
7 1/8" x 4 1/2" sheet, 10" x 7 3/4" mount.

Shown in profile on a weathered log against a softly washed gray sky, the animal displays the dark saddle, pale flanks, banded shoulder stripe, and bushy russet tail by which the wolverine was known to British natural historians of the period. Howitt has rendered the long guard hairs with fine parallel strokes, picking out the dark legs, white-tipped claws, and pale facial mask with characteristic delicacy.

The watercolor belongs to the series of North American quadrupeds that Howitt produced in the second decade of the nineteenth century, which descended through the Fearnley Hall collection. Like those works, it was almost certainly drawn after a mounted specimen rather than from life. Howitt, who never traveled to the Americas, is known to have studied taxidermied animals at William Bullock’s museum in Piccadilly and at the British Museum, supplementing direct observation with sketches and descriptions supplied by sportsmen and naturalists returning from abroad.

For an English audience of the early nineteenth century, the wolverine carried an exotic, almost mythic charge. The species (variously called the glutton, carcajou, or quickhatch) inhabited the boreal forests and tundra of Scandinavia, Russia, and British North America, regions that lay at the commercial and scientific edges of Britain’s imperial reach. Through the Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered in 1670, wolverine pelts arrived regularly in London auction rooms; their dense, frost-shedding fur was particularly prized for trimming hoods and cuffs in cold-weather clothing. Tales of the animal’s strength, cunning, and prodigious appetite had circulated in British natural history since Thomas Pennant’s Arctic Zoology (1784–87) and were further embellished by accounts from Samuel Hearne and the Franklin expeditions.

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