‘A Delight for the Eye and the Mind’

While compiling a previous entry, I chanced upon one of several digital collections hosted by the Academy of Natural Sciences’ Ewell Sale Stewart Library, namely A Delight for the Eye and the Mind, ‘books on molluscs and their shells’.

The image above is of a ‘Pink, or Queen Conch’ Strombus gigas taken from From Jean Charles Chenu’s, Illustrations Conchyliologiques, published in Paris between 1842 and 1853. Among the other digital collections are: The Remarkable Nature of Edward Lear; Nature's Great Masterpiece: The Elephant; Foul and Loathsome Creatures (‘Illustrated Herpetological Books’); and Drawn from the Deep (‘The Fish in Science, Art and the Imagination’). I have excerpted a single, sample image from each of these collections, below:

Leadbetter’s Cockatoo, one of 42 plates in Edward Lear’s 1832 work Illustrations of the family of Psittacidœ, or Parrots.

Known the world over as the author of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and other ‘nonsense poems’ for children, Edward Lear (1812-1888) was also an extraordinarily accomplished natural history painter, ranked by many contemporaries—and subsequent art historians—as an artist on a par with John James Audubon - Robert McCracken Peck.

Engraving by Mathäus Merian from the Historiae naturalis de quadrupedibus (Amsterdam, 1657) of Joannes Jonstonus (1603-1675).

Although Jonstonus’ ‘Natural History’ was a popular book, going through many editions in Holland and Germany in the 17th century, it was filled with fanciful plagiarizations of the works of Gesner and Aldrovandi. It did, however, contain superb copperplate engravings by Mathäus Merian - C. Danial Elliott.

Plates 6-7 from Léon-Louis Vaillant and Guillaume Grandidier’s 1910 publication Histoire Physique, Naturelle et Politique de Madagascar, vol. 17: Histoire Naturelles des Reptiles. Première Partie: Crocodiles et Tortues, illustrating Testudo radiata aka Geochelone (or Astrochelys) radiata (Shaw, 1802).

Illustration from Louis Renard’s 1754 opus, Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes, de Diverses Couleurs et Figures Extraordinaires, Que l’on Trouve Autour des Isles Moluques et sur les Côtes des Terres Australes.

A translation of the title of this work, ‘Fishes, crayfishes, and crabs, of diverse coloration and extraordinary form, which are to be found about the Islands of the Moluccas and on the coasts of the Southern Lands,’ gives a glimpse of its remarkable contents. There are 100 plates with brilliantly colored engravings representing 416 fishes, 40 crustaceans, two grasshoppers, one dugong, and a mermaid … It is one of the rarest and most famous natural history books known, and one of the very few pre-Linnaean works on fishes to be published in color.

Posted by misteraitch at June 26, 2003 10:45 AM | TrackBack