‘That Incomparable Instrument Maker’: The Reputation of Henry Sutton

Abstract

The London mathematical instrument maker Henry Sutton (c. 1624–65) has been recognised since his own time as one of the most skilled engravers in his trade in seventeenth-century England. His versatility allowed him to work directly on brass or on wood and also in reverse on a copper printing plate. Thus much of his surviving oeuvre is bound into books, although a number of his printed instruments have survived as single printed sheets, applied to a brass plate or more usually a wooden board. The instruments of his preserved at the Whipple Museum are among those generally cited by collectors, curators, and instrument historians to justify a reputation that has continued to the present. Sutton’s reputation is the theme of this chapter: how it was promoted and established in his lifetime, and how it survived him for a century or so, not simply for connoisseurs but for mathematical practitioners. The pioneering chronicler of these practitioners, Eva Taylor, offered a very fair assessment: ‘one of the best known engravers of scales, quadrants, etc., of his day, was renowned for his accuracy and was in demand for drawing diagrams for mathematical books’. Engraving skill, accuracy, and books were pillars of Sutton’s work, and this account of the renown it achieved will be intertwined with a consideration of his instruments, specifically the horary quadrants. Sutton made a great variety of mathematical instruments, and seems to have relished those requiring sets of engraved projection lines, such as astrolabes, types of horary quadrant, and William Oughtred’s ‘horizontal instrument’. Most of the well-known museums containing seventeenth-century instruments have a few in their collections, with the Whipple Museum holding a particularly rich and varied selection. At thirteen instruments, the Whipple’s collection of Sutton material may be the largest of any museum.