Sir George Francis Hampson
(1860 - 1936)
  
Don Herbison-Evans
(donherbisonevans@yahoo.com)
and
Stella Crossley


George Hamson was born in London, and educated at Oxford. He travelled to India and became interested in the moths there.

Returning to UK, he started working at the British Museum, and started cataloguing the moths there, writing various major works including :

  • The Fauna of British India,
  • List of the specimens of Lepidoptera Heterocera of the British Museum,
  • Catalogue of the Lepidoptera Phalaenae in the British Museum.

    For many of his works, he employed Horace Knight to make plates of coloured illustrations which were printed by West, Newman & Co., but for his in-text illustrations: his line drawings were engraved by photo-zincography, using a photographic negative to chemically etch Hampson's precise black lines onto a zinc plate for inclusion in his text by Taylor & Francis, who then printed them with the text.

    A copy of an illustration by Hampson used in this website -


    Dipterygina kebeae



    in progress


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    (written 6 September 2026)