Denton (Born 1857) was born in the United States. At a young age, he traveled extensively in the United States and abroad with his father who was a naturalist. He taught himself to draw during his travels. It was a type of existence that can be described as a Huckleberry Finn type, and as an adult it gave him the basis to earn a living creatively through his mastery as an artist and naturalist, not to mention being a collector of precious stones. In 1883, upon his father’s death in New Guinea, the artist came back to the United States to work with the United States Fish Commission at the Smithsonian Institute. It was during this period that he learned the art of taxidermy of fish. Denton made watercolors of many of his collection while mounting fish. The chromolithographs included in the reports of the Commission were taken from his watercolors of North American fish.
The Commission’s First Annual Report referred to the authentic representation of the illustrations of the subjects. Denton’s good-looking chromolithographs were executed skillfully and the report included close to 100 salt and freshwater fish as well as several other subjects, such as oysters, lobsters, the Virginia deer and Ring-Necked Pheasant. They were published both unbound in a folio set and in books. In the broadest sense, Denton was a naturalist. He’s known for creating a special mount for butterflies. In fact his moth and butterfly collection was unrivaled and Wellesley College collected a large portion of it later in his life.
