Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes, de Diverses Couleurs et Figures Extraordinaires (French Edition)

In highly ornate French prose, Louis Renard dedicated a remarkable book to his benefactor King George I; he describes the publication as "one of the most precious works to enrich natural history since the birth of literature." Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes, de Diverses Couleurs et Figures Extraordinaires, quel’on Trouve Autour des Isles Moluques, et sur les Côtes des Terres Australes (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) was published in three editions between 1719 and 1782. All three editions contain 100 plates with 460 brilliantly colored engravings representing 416 fishes, 40 crustaceans, two grasshoppers, one dugong, and a mermaid. With minor exceptions, all of the illustrations depict tropical species of the East Indies, an area encompassing the Indian subcontinent, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and the countless islands east of the South China Sea. Renard’s Poissons is one of the rarest natural history books known, and one of the very few pre-Linnaean works on fishes to be published in color.

Renard’s book was published when the intellectual world of Europe was just beginning to feel the effects of the Age of Enlightenment. Describers of nature, particularly scientific illustrators, were developing a greater concern with making exact and precise representations of living things. Interest in all things botanical and zoological was intense, and it was in this atmosphere that Louis Renard introduced his book of elaborately colored fishes and crustaceans. In many ways, Renard’s book is a product of this new interest in scientific inquiry based on direct observation and reason. But despite the rational approach emphasized in Renard’s introductory remarks, and his honest attempt to produce an accurate picture of the marine fauna of the East Indies, the work is clouded by embellishment, exaggeration, and outright falsification. Today, however, a reassessment of these almost surrealistic renderings made nearly 300 years ago reveals not only tremendous aesthetic and historical value, but scientific worth as well.

Commentary and English translation by Theodore W. Pietsch.