page_title: White Watson
section_title: Life 1760–1800
hierarchical_section_title: White Watson / Life 1760–1800
caption_attribution_description: Model of Derbyshire strata made by White Watson
context_page_description: White Watson was an early English geologist, sculptor, stonemason and carver, marble-worker and mineral dealer. In common with many learned people of his time, he was skilled in a number of artistic and scientific areas, becoming a writer, poet, journalist, teacher, botanist and gardener as well as a geologist and mineralogist. He kept extensive diaries and sketchbooks of his observations on geology, fossils and minerals, flora and fauna, and published a small but significant and influential number of geological papers and catalogues. As an artist he was well known locally for his silhouettes, both on paper and as marble inlays.
context_section_description: Watson was born at Whitely Wood Hall, Whiteley Woods, near Sheffield, on 10 April 1760. His father was Samuel Watson, a millstone manufacturer of Baslow, Derbyshire, his mother Martha White (which is from where his unusual first name derives). Watson's great-grandfather, Samuel Watson, and his grandfather, also Samuel Watson, had been sculptors and stonemasons engaged on the re-building of Chatsworth House between 1687 and 1706. Continuing the family tradition, in later years White Watson would also work for the Chatsworth Estate.
  Whilst still a child, Watson became interested in minerals and fossils, and began his own collection as well as providing specimens for sale in his uncle's shop. His uncle, Henry Watson, had been a marble sculptor in Bakewell and Ashford-in-the-Water since the early 1750s, and he built and owned the water-powered marble mill in Ashford-in-the-Water. Henry Watson was largely responsible for founding the trade in the local Blue John fluorite and Ashford Black Marble, and provided the magnificent black and white marble flooring for the Great Hall at Chatsworth House in 1779. On leaving Sheffield School at the age of 14, White Watson went to live with his uncle, and was apprenticed to him on 31 May 1774. According to his own catalogue, now preserved in Sheffield Library, he formally began his collection of fossils and marbles the same year. By 1782 he was advertising his trade as a sculptor and engraver, and helping his uncle to run the business.
  Possibly inspired by geologist John Whitehurst's 1782 diagrams of stratigraphic sections in the Matlock area of Derbyshire, in 1785 Watson presented Whitehurst with a diagrammatic 'Tablet', 'A Section of a Mountain in Derbyshire', made from samples of the rocks themselves. This innovative method of display not only showed an early understanding of the new science of geological strata but also formed the first attempt at documenting the stratigraphical structure of Derbyshire as a whole as opposed to the structure of specific localities as Whitehurst had. Over the course of his life, Watson would produce about 100 such tablets, accompanied with explanatory leaflets, and his papers contain sketches for considerably more. Unfortunately most of these tablets are now untraceable, although around fifteen are known to still survive.
  Henry Watson died in 1786, and the Ashford-in-the-Water business was then sold. From here on, White Watson became a finisher of marble—for many years a considerable part of his business continued to be gravestones and monumental church marbles—and a fossil and mineral specimen dealer from his own premises in Bakewell which he maintained as a shop and museum for his collection until his death. It was White Watson who was chiefly responsible for the popular commercialisation of works produced in Ashford Black Marble, a limestone impregnated with bitumen to give it its sleek blackness.
  In the early 1790s Watson collaborated with William Martin (1767–1810) on an illustrated catalogue of Derbyshire's Carboniferous Limestone fossils. Watson had been unsuccessfully attempting to raise funding for such a publication since 1790, and produced a one-page ' Prospectus of a Catalogue and Description of Derbyshire Fossils ' outlining the proposal (now in Sheffield Central Library) that year (a second prospectus on the theme, in conjunction with Martin, dates from 1792). However, after they began working together on the project and managed to raise the necessary funds to publish, Martin began to produce installments on his own from 1793, using Watson's text contributions and his accompanying plates with virtually no credit given. As a result, the pair eventually fell out, and Martin re-published the series under his own name as Volume I of Petrificata Derbiensia in 1809 without giving any credit to Watson at all.
  Watson was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1795, and remained a member until his death. He was also a member of the Derby Philosophical Society from 1800, nominated by Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, and a member of the Bri
caption: A cross section of Derbyshire geology made from sections of rock by White Watson. Now in Derby Museum.
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