Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
From the beginnings of the Society, Members donated specimens, books and illustrations to the Library and Museum collections. The earliest mention of a portrait image being given was Louis Albert Necker's donation of an engraving of his maternal grandfather Horace Benedict de Saussure in December 1811 [no longer extant].
The Society also holds larger oil paintings and portrait busts of its Fellows, again acquired through donation or by purchase. However from the 1860s onwards, when commercial photography became more available, the Society actively sought to collect images of its Fellows probably inspired by a printed notice issued by the photographer's studio Maull and Polyblank announcing the formation of a carte de visite series of Geological Society Fellows (LDGSL/332). The majority of the images in the portrait collection derive from this series, stopping around the First World War. After the 1930s, and up until the 1990s, portraits were generally only collected of Presidents of the Society.