Late 18th Century Pigeons & Doves Framed Antique 18th Century Hand Colored Book Illustration, 1785, Buffon Natural History

Description

Illustrated page from the Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere by Le Comte de Buffon ca. 1785.

Framed and matted as … more Illustrated page from the Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere by Le Comte de Buffon ca. 1785.

Framed and matted as shown.

Showing selected members of the Pigeon and Dove family this is from Volume IV, Oiseaux (birds) of Buffon's compendious natural history, eventually stretching to 36 volumes plus additional post mortem publications.

This is plate IV showing 1) Le Ramier; 2) Le Biset and:3) La Tourterelle. These are the wood pigeon, rock dove and turtle dove respectively.

Hand colored engraving, 12 1/4 x 9 3/4 in frame, 5 3/4 x 3 1/2 sight, slight foxing. Black paper dust cover to rear with framers label.



Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French: 7 September 1707 – 16 April 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopedist. He was director of the Jardin du Roi, now called the Jardin des Plantes.

His works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including two prominent French scientists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle during his lifetime, with additional volumes based on his notes and further research being published in the two decades following his death.

Credited with being one of the first naturalists to recognize ecological succession, he was later forced by the theology committee at the University of Paris to recant his theories about geological history and animal evolution because they contradicted the Biblical narrative of Creation. less