Wilson A. “Snowflake” Bentley (1865-1931)
Wilson A. Bentley, known as “Snowflake Bentley”, was born in Jericho, Vermont in 1865. Fascinated with the complexity and unique characteristics of snow crystals at an early age, Bentley made it his life’s mission to capture images of individual snowflakes. Bentley received a microscope for his fifteenth birthday, and by the time he was nineteen he had attached this microscope to a bellows camera and began producing photomicrographs of individual snow crystals. Bentley worked quickly in an outdoor studio with cold metal trays, photographing over five thousand snowflakes over the course of his life. From this intensive study, Bentley discovered that no two snowflakes are alike.
In 1931, Bentley’s body of work, Snow Crystals, was published by McGraw-Hill. Ironically, one month after the book was published; Bentley was caught in a blizzard, and died of pneumonia. A museum in Jericho, Vermont dedicated to Bentley’s work houses approximately 2000 of his vintage photomicrographs. Bentley earned the nickname “Snowflake Bentley” posthumously at a ceremony to dedicate the opening of the museum.
This collection of thirty photomicrographs has descended in the family of Henry Crocker (born 1845), a preacher and noted Naturalist in Fairfax, Vermont who played a role in discovering and promoting Wilson Bentley’s work through his writings. Crocker amassed the largest private collection of Bentley’s photomicrographs, and we are fortunate to present a fraction of these remarkable discoveries at auction.