110 Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre & Robert Benard - Hand-coloured Fish Print - Wrasse, Ruffe, etc.

Hand-coloured engraving originates from a French work entitled "Encyclopédie Méthodique", published in Paris between 1789 and 1832 under the supervision of Panckoucke. This was the largest encyclopaedia of the enlightenment, covering all aspects of the natural world, in the comprehensive mode that was very much the driving force of the era. 

The Encyclopédie Méthodique par ordre des matières ("Methodical Encyclopedia by Order of Subject Matter") is a roughly 210 to 216 volumes encyclopedia (different sets were bound differently) that was published between 1782 and 1832 by the French publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke his son-in-law Henri Agasse, and the latter´s wife, Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse. It was a revised and much expanded version, arranged by disciplines, of the originally alphabetically arranged Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond D'Alembert. The full title was L'Encyclopédie Méthodique ou par ordre de matières par une société de gens de lettres, de savants et d'artistes; précédée d'un vocabulaire universel, servant de table pour tout l'ouvrage, ornée des portraits de MM. Diderot et d'Alembert, premiers éditeurs de l'Encyclopédie. 

Abbe Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre (1752-1804), was a priest in the Rouergue and professor at the central school of Rhodes. The publisher Panckoucke employed Bonnaterre to contribute to the Encyclopedie Methodique, in the area of mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes and insects. Bonnaterre composed an extensive text for the part on fishes and availed himself of the works of most of the earlier authors and collected drawings of more than 400 species. He copied many of the drawings of Bloch and when these were not available he took them from the works of Gronovius, Broussonet, Pennant and others. When these authors failed him he even returned to the classics like Willughby, Rondelet and Piso.

Artist or Maker: 

Robert Benard

Dimensions:

24 cm x 31 cm 

Medium: 

Engraving

Date: 

1788