Edmé-Louis Daubenton

Edmé-Louis Daubenton (1732 - 1786) was a French naturalist.

Edmé-Louis Daubenton's tombstone is in the church of Saint-Pierre in Avon. It was Buffon who engaged this cousin of Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton, Edmé-Louis, to supervise the illustrated edition of his "Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière". The plates, "Planches enluminées", started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 boards, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet (1731-1790) [http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-Nicolas_Martinet] and all painted by hand. The Parisian editor Panckoucke published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 boards relate to the birds, the others illustrate especially butterflies but also other insects, corals, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the illustrated species. Some of these are extinct today. As Buffon did not follow the system of biological nomenclature developed by Carl von Linné in 1783, Pieter Boddaert (1730-1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean binomial names.

References

*Benezit, E. (1999) "Dictionnaire Critique et Documentaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs de Tous les Temps et de Tous les Pays". Nouvelle Edition. Paris: Gründ,.
*Bureau, Louis. (1907) “Sur un Atlas des Planches Coloriées de l’Ornithologie de Brisson Attribué au Peintre Martinet, Provenant de la Vente Alph. Milne-Edwards” in Proceedings of the Fourth International Ornithological Congress, London, June 1905, published as vol.XIV of Ornis. p.176-180.
*Cowan, C.F.(1968). "The Daubentons and Buffon's Birds" "Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History" Vol.5, pt.1 37-40.