Died in Juillac, France, on 26 January 1871, having pioneered aquarium-based marine biology and invented the aquarium.
Jeanne Villepreux-Power died on 26 January 1871 in Juillac, the same village of her birth, after a long and eventful life that had taken her from rural France to Paris and Sicily and back again. She was 76 years old at the time of her death.
Her later years were marked by hardship: a shipwreck in 1843 during a voyage from Sicily to London destroyed many of her manuscripts, drawings, and scientific instruments, dealing a severe blow to her research legacy. She and her husband subsequently divided their time between London and France, and following his death she returned to her native Limousin, living out her final years in relative obscurity compared to the recognition she had earned in Sicilian and broader European scientific circles decades earlier.
Despite the loss of much of her original work, her core contributions endured: her invention of the aquarium as a scientific instrument, her demonstration that the paper nautilus secretes its own shell, and her broader advocacy for observing living marine organisms in controlled environments had already reshaped the emerging discipline of marine biology. Her death closed the life of a woman who, working largely outside formal academic institutions and without the benefit of higher education available to men of her era, had nonetheless earned recognition from scientific academies across Europe and the epithet 'Mother of Aquariophily.'