Adam Sedgwick
(1785-1873), GeologistEarly Victorian Portraits Catalogue Entry
Sitter in 8 portraits
One of the founders of modern geology. In 1818 he was elected to the Woodwardian Professorship of Geology at the University of Cambridge, a post he held for the next fifty-five years. He set out on his first geological excursion in the summer of 1818 and delivered a course of lectures the following year. He quickly amassed a large collection of rocks and fossils, enhancing the Woodwardian's reputation as a geological museum, and proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale. Charles Darwin was one of his geological students and the two kept up a correspondence while Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. However, Sedgwick never accepted the case for evolution made in the Origin of Species.
by Augustin Edouart
silhouette, 1828
NPG 4502
by Thomas Woolner
plaster cast of bust, circa 1860
NPG 1669
by William Edward Kilburn
albumen carte-de-visite, circa 1862
NPG x45090
by William Farren
albumen carte-de-visite, 1867
NPG x22397
by Farren Brothers
albumen carte-de-visite, 1867
NPG x47132
by Samuel Cousins, published by Molteno & Graves, after Thomas Phillips
mezzotint, published 1 November 1833 (1832)
NPG D40630
by Samuel Cousins, after Thomas Phillips
mezzotint, published 1833
NPG D5929
by Thomas Herbert Maguire, printed by M & N Hanhart
lithograph, 1850
NPG D40629
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