AFA Summer 2020

Summer 106 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com François Levaillant (French, 1753–1824), author; Jacques Barraband (French, 1767–1809), artist, Plate 16 from Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de paradis et des rolliers (Natural History of Birds of Paradise and Rollers), Volume 1. Book with color engravings with additional hand-coloring, 1801–1806. 22 x 15¾ inches. University of Michigan Library Museums Library. Almost fifty years after Brisson’s groundbreaking Ornithologie (1760), François Levaillant published Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de paradis et des rolliers , one of a series of extravagant ornithological books he produced that describe particular families of birds—in this case, primarily the showy birds of paradise of New Guinea and Australia. The stunning hand-colored plates by Jacques Barraband, who had made designs for the Gobelins tapestry works and for porcelain manufactories, are among the most beautiful and accurate produced in the nineteenth century. Levaillant, who was born to French parents in Paramaribo, in what is now Suriname, pursued a lifelong love of birds, learning how to properly hunt them and preserve their skins and studying various private collections of birds in Paris. Though still largely obliged to study preserved specimens rather than live birds, Levaillant believed in the necessity of observation of behavior as “the best way of discovering the true place that each species occupies in the natural order,” and his ornithological studies are prime examples of the move toward greater specialization in the natural sciences, particularly ornithology, in the early 1800s.