Biography

French botanical artist and botanist. Born in Vire, the son of a poor artisan, Turpin received little formal education but was trained in the elements of drawing by a local artist before joining the battalion of Calvados and being posted to the French colony of Saint Domingue at the age of 14. After the battalion was returned to France, he was attached at Rennes as secretary and artist to General Charles Leclerc, brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. Leclerc took a personal interest in his career and had him promoted to sub-lieutenant of a cavalry regiment, in which, however, Turpin never served; instead he obtained permission in 1794 to return to Saint-Domingue, which was in the midst of revolution.

On disembarking at Cap-Haitien, he was befriended by the self-taught botanist and botanical artist Pierre Antoine Poiteau, who had been sent to the colony as a plant collector by the Jardin des Plantes. Poiteau taught him botany and the two friends collected and painted the tropical flora of the island together, including a year on Ile de la Tortue when they were sponsored by the American consul, Edward Stevens, a great plant enthusiast. Their collaboration resulted in hundreds of illustrated plates and a herbarium of several thousand specimens representing about 1200 different species.

Poiteau left for the United States near the end of 1800, but Turpin continued to make botanical drawings for Stevens on the island of Saint Suzanne and at Cap-Haitien. But with the death of his old protector, Leclerc, in 1802 Turpin was plunged into a state of utter destitution. Luckily, because of his reputation among the colonists as an expert on medicinal plants, the army's chief physician appointed him as a military pharmacist but with no obligation to fulfil his duties. Shortly afterwards, in a massacre of French colonists, his Creole wife and their two children were killed, a fate he avoided by hiding in a crate of sugar on board a ship that was set to sail. Having safely reached the United States, Turpin visited Philadelphia where he met Alexander von Humboldt, recently returned from his travels in South America, who asked him to make drawings from his vast collection of plants, one of the first commissions that Turpin undertook on being repatriated.

Reunited with Poiteau in Paris, Turpin collaborated on some of the most important botanical works of the period. These included their own six-volume treatise on fruit trees, a study of cacti, and a flora of Paris, although publication of the latter was suspended because of the financial crisis created by the Napoleonic wars. Turpin also provided the illustrations for the Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle by Deterville and for works by Delessert, Savigny and Delisle, Labillardi⟨re, Ventenat and de Candolle, among others. Equipped with one of the best microscopes of his time, he made many interesting discoveries in plant physiology, which attracted the attention of the Acad⟩mies des Sciences and eventually led to his election as a member in 1833. He also published descriptions of several new genera and species from his botanical collections in the Annales du Museum national d'Histoire Naturelle, including Castela erecta, C. depressa, Cypselea humifusa and Thovinia paniculata. The genus Turpinia (Staphyleaceae) was named in his honour by Ventenat.

Sources:
F. Boisart, 1848, Notices biographiques, litteraires et critiques sur les hommes du Calvados.