Rosel, John Augustus

, a painter and entomologist, the descendant of a decayed noble family, was born in 1705 near Arnstadt, and settled at Nuremberg as a miniature-painter, but particularly distinguished himself as one | of the greatest insect-painters. The works which he published from his coloured designs will not only, whilst they last, interest the classic entomologist, but every one whose taste for form and colour in animal nature is not confined to men, quadrupeds, or birds. He treated objects which required the minuteness of Denner, with equal truth and better judgment, in a style of energy and animated grandeur which approaches to history. As a writer he is as authentic and faithful as tiresome and prolix; but though he lived in the infancy of the science, the simple and constant characteristics by which he distinguished the classes of the genera he represented and described, have not yet been superseded by the complex and involved systems Of his successors. He died in 1759. ¹