MANUEL, Blaise Etienne and Jacques Eustache de SÈVE (d. 1829, illustrator)

Nouveau Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle... Dessinées par M. Desève, et autres habiles Artistes...Tome Premier

Paris: Chez F. Dufart, 1806. 8vo. (8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches). [ii], 30, [1], 60 pp. Illustrated with 101 colour-printed plates with tissue guards.

Original red straight-grain paper over boards, morocco lettering-pieces gilt

One of the earliest zoological books illustrated with colour-printed plates, and among the rarest French natural-history colour-plate books of the Napoleonic period.

Manuel's Nouveau Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle was planned as an ambitious illustrated survey of the natural world. The present volume, designated Tome Premier, is devoted to the animal kingdom, specifically viviparous quadrupeds. It contains a general preface, Manuel's introductory text, 101 colour-printed plates, and accompanying descriptions of the animals represented. The plates, most with two subjects, draw on the tradition of eighteenth-century French natural history illustration and include zebras, a giraffe, gazelles, bison, hyenas, a llama, and several species of dogs, alongside a wide range of other mammals. Quérard, in La France littéraire, treated the Nouveau Muséum as doubtful, noting only Debray's reference to a projected work and stating that it appeared to have remained merely a project. Engelmann, however, firmly records the actual published volume in Bibliotheca historico-naturalis. Nissen likewise includes the work in his standard bibliography of zoological illustration. The scale and cost of the undertaking help explain its apparent abandonment. The list of subscribers reportedly contains only twenty-four names, and the subscription price of sixty francs was substantial for such a speculative illustrated publication. Its colour-printed plates made the project technically ambitious as well as commercially difficult, and the first volume was all that appeared. The present volume thus stands at the intersection of Enlightenment zoological classification, colour-printing, and the commercial risks of ambitious scientific publishing in early nineteenth-century France. The work is extremely rare: only two other examples have been traced, in the holdings of the Field Museum Library, Chicago, and the U.S. Department of the Interior Library.

Nissen, DZB, 2686; Quérard, La France littéraire, v, p. 497; Engelmann, Bibliotheca historico-naturalis, p. 180.

Item #42818

Price: $3,800.00