Description
Description of Nicolas Robert & John Jonston's Collection d'oiseaux les plus rares gravés et dessiné
These beautiful prints of birds after Nicolas Robert from an 18th-century reissue of two 17th-century natural history works. The reissue combined Robert's prints on the birds of the royal menagerie at Versailles, originally published in 1676, with a French edition of John Jonston's 1650 work on birds, taken from a section of Theatrum Universale Omnium Animalium. The prints depict birds of prey, waterfowl, songbirds and tropical species. The entire set originally contained 23 plates by Robert and 62 by Jonston. Jonston's earlier work was translated from Latin and the descriptions of birds expanded. The names of the birds are given in Latin and French in the Robert plates, and sometimes also in other European languages in the Jonston plates. The Robert and Jonston reissue was published as an accompaniment to a new edition of plates by natural history illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian. Nicolas Robert was a French watercolorist, draftsman and printmaker, widely regarded as the most accomplished botanical artist of the 17th century. The son of an innkeeper, he made his way to Italy, where he produced his first great work, a unique album of floral paintings called the Guirlande de Julie in 1641, which established his reputation as an artist. In 1650, Gaston d'Orléans, brother of Louis XIII commissioned a set of paintings on vellum of the birds and flowers of his menagerie and botanical garden at the Château of Blois. Over the next decade he filled five large folio volumes. Robert was appointed painter to the King by Gaston's nephew, King Louis XIV, in 1664, documenting the royal gardens. The 700 original natural history paintings he produced for Gaston d'Orléans and the royal collection became the nucleus of the famous Vélins du Muséum collection of natural history studies now in the library of the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. His other crowning achievement were the 39 plates he produced for Dionys Dodart's Mémoires pour servir à L'Histoire des Plantes, a large folio published by the Royal Press, a landmark in the history of botanical illustration.