Oiseaux

1772 · rif. 14366 — 1772. Jonston John and Nicolas Robert. Collection d'oiseaux les plus rares 1772 preserves Nicolas Robert's seventeenth-century ornithological imagery in an eighteenth-century publication devoted to birds from the royal menagerie and Jonston's natural history of birds. Published in Paris by L. C. Desnos the work joined Robert's images of birds associated with the French royal collections to a French treatment of Jonston's earlier natural history placing seventeenth-century court-sponsored observation within the expanding eighteenth-century literature of ornithology. Jonston John and Robert Nicolas. Collection d'oiseaux les plus rares. Paris: L. C. Desnos 1772. Etching depicting six birds of prey each perched on a branch; one bird wears bells attached to its legs a detail associated with trained birds used in falconry. Etching measures 11" by 7"; overall sheet measures 12.5" by 17.75". The plate belongs to Desnos's Collection d'oiseaux les plus rares gravés et dessinés d'après nature which incorporated images by Nicolas Robert with material derived from Jonston's natural history of birds. Robert worked for Gaston d'Orléans before his natural-history paintings passed with Gaston's collections to Louis XIV. Under royal patronage Robert continued depicting plants and animals including birds kept at the royal menagerie; his surviving vellums became an early nucleus of the natural-history illustration collections now preserved by the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. This 1772 printing records the continued circulation of Robert's seventeenth-century bird imagery more than a century after its creation while the bells visible on one raptor preserve a specific visual reference to contemporary falconry practice. Condition not supplied. unknown