Gobe-mouche, de la Caroline.

Date1770-1786

Engraver Francois Nicolas Martinet

Publisher Comte de Buffon

OriginEurope, France, Paris

MediumBlack and white etching with period hand color

DimensionsFramed H: 10 1/4" x W: 8 3/4"

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number1990-265

DescriptionThe lower margin reads: "Gobe-mouche, de la Caroline."
Label TextThis bird was published Buffon's Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux of 1770-1783, an edited version of the nine bird volumes of the Histoire Naturelle Generale. The plates are from drawings by one of France's foremost bird artists at the time, Francois Nicholas Martinet.

This is also the same bird as depicted in Catesby's plate 55, "The Tyrant." See Catesby's Birds of Colonial America, p. 92. The single greatest influence of all subsequent bird and animal books must be the French polymath Buffon. Born in Burgundy in 1707, as a young man he studied law but gave it up in favour of medicine and natural history. Buffon was a prodigiously talented man whose interests and accomplishments ranged through mathematics, astronomy and all the sciences; his theories made him enemies as well as admirers. In 1732 he visited England, where he was made a member of the Royal Society. Preparations for his great work, the Histoire Naturelle Generale, started in 1739 when he was appointed keeper of the Jardin du Roi, the precursor of the Paris Zoo, and continued for nearly half a century until his death in 1788.