Background
Henry Dawkins was born about 1753.
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Henry Dawkins
Edit ProfileEducation
Dawkins learned to engrave upon metals in London, and about the year 1753 settled in New York City.
Career
Dawkins is said by Dunlap to have been originally an engraver of buttons and shop bills, but after coming to this country he became a general practitioner of the art, finding the field open. His hook plates, of which about twenty have been identified, are poor copies of the Chippendale style. The earliest example of his work in America is the book plate for John Burnet of New York, which bears the date 1754.
In 1757 he was in Philadelphia as assistant to James Turner, engraver, and in the following year he began business for himself. In the Pennsylvania Journal, July 19, 1758, in an advertisement, he described himself as engraver from London, who lately wrought with Mr. James Turner, ” and stated that “he engraves all sort of maps, shopkeepers bills, bills of parcel, coats of arms for gentlemen’s books, coats of arms, cyphers, and other devices on plate; likewise seals, and mourning rings cut after the neatest manner and at the most reasonable rates. ”
While in Philadelphia he became a member of the Grand Lodge of Masons, and in 1764 was elected junior warden of his lodge.
Dawkins was notorious for his poor equipment for the higher forms of engraving which he essayed. He cut caricatures, notably one picturing an incident in Philadelphia in 1764, at the time of the Paxton Boys excitement. Two of his engravings illustrate the first volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society; one of these is a plate to illustrate the paper by Rittenhouse on the Transit of Venus, 1769. During the Revolution (May 1776) he was arrested in New York on suspicion of counterfeiting Continental and Provincial currency.
In October 1776, he petitioned the New York Committee of Safety “for a termination of his sorrows by a death. ” The history of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania states that Dawkins was probably hanged for counterfeiting. That this view is erroneous is proved by the Journals of the Continental Congress, where it is recorded that on October 13, 1780, a warrant to Henry Dawkins was issued on the treasurer for fifteen hundred dollars “on account for engraving and altering the border and back pieces for striking the bills of credit of the United States. ” After this date he disappears from view.
Achievements
Connections
Dawkins married Priscilla Wood, October 2, 1757, in Philadelphia, and there his seven children were born. Two of them were buried in that city, the second being Captain John Dawkins, a mariner, who died in 1804.
