Pierre Jean François Turpin (Born in 1755 – Died in 1840) was the son of an impoverished artisan. Even though he studied drawing in France, his artistic skills were largely self-taught. He became an outstanding illustrator and a competent botanist who was credited with many significant scientific achievements. Surprisingly, he was relatively unknown and never managed to achieve the celebrity status of the likes of Pierre Redouté. However, he was ranked among the leading floral illustrators of the Napoleonic Era. François Turpin left his home to join the army in 1789 and he was first stationed in Haiti in 1794. This is where he met Poiteau Alexandere, from whom he learned botany, and later formed a strong career connection. The two collaborated on a study of the flora of Haiti, and in the course of their work, they collected a herbarium of more than thousand plants. François Turpin made drawings of many of these plants in the field to serve as the foundation for describing about 800 species for further study in France. When the two returned to their homeland, they worked together and embarked of refining the collection and preparing the material for publication. François Turpin decided to go for more adventure on a foreign land. He traveled alone to Tortuga Island and Hispanola to make further botanical studies. In 1800, he moved to the U.S. where he met Humboldt with whom he again forged a strong relationship that proved fruitful later on in his career. François Turpin again moved to Haiti, to serve as an army pharmacist, not as an artist or botanist as one would expect.
