Edme-Louis Daubenton (12 August 1730 – 12 December 1785) was a French

naturalist Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is cal ...

. Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist,

Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton (; 29 May 1716 – 1 January 1800) was a French natural history, naturalist and contributor to the ''Encyclopédie, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers''. Biography Daubent ...

. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental ''

Histoire Naturelle The ''Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi'' (; ) is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (quarto) volumes written between 1749–1804, initially by the Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Comte ...

'' (1749–89). The ''Planches enluminée'' started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by

François-Nicolas Martinet François-Nicolas Martinet (1731 - c. 1800) was a French engineer, engraver and naturalist. Although trained as an engineer and draftsman, he began to produce engravings for books and it later became his primary profession. Martinet's year of b ...

(1731–1800), and all painted by hand. The

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

ian publisher

Panckoucke The Panckoucke family was a French family engaged in publishing and printing. * Amélie Panckoucke (1750-1830), writer and salonnière, sister of Charles-Joseph; * André Joseph Panckoucke (1703-1753), founder of the Panckoucke bookstore in Lille ...

published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings. 973 plates relate to

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class (biology), class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the Oviparity, laying of Eggshell, hard-shelled eggs, a high Metabolism, metabolic rate, a fou ...

s; others illustrate especially

butterflies Butterflies are winged insects from the lepidopteran superfamily Papilionoidea, characterized by large, often brightly coloured wings that often fold together when at rest, and a conspicuous, fluttering flight. The oldest butterfly fossi ...

but also other

insect Insects (from Latin ') are Hexapoda, hexapod invertebrates of the class (biology), class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (Insect morphology#Head, head, ...

coral Corals are colonial marine invertebrates within the subphylum Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact Colony (biology), colonies of many identical individual polyp (zoology), polyps. Coral species include the important Coral ...

s, etc. The illustrations were not very successful, but they allow a rather good determination of the species illustrated, some of them now extinct. As Buffon did not follow the system of

biological nomenclature Nomenclature codes or codes of nomenclature are the various rulebooks that govern the naming of living organisms. Standardizing the Binomial nomenclature, scientific names of biological organisms allows researchers to discuss findings (including ...

developed by

Carl von Linné Carl Linnaeus (23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné, Blunt (2004), p. 171. was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organi ...

in 1783,

Pieter Boddaert Pieter Boddaert (1730 – 6 May 1795) was a Dutch physician and naturalist. Early life, family and education Boddaert was the son of a Middelburg jurist and poet by the same name (1694–1760). The younger Pieter obtained his M.D. at the Univers ...

(1730–1796) published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean

binomial names In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin grammatical forms, altho ...

. Edme-Louis Daubenton's tombstone is in the church of Saint-Pierre in

Avon, Seine-et-Marne Avon () is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France. Geography Avon and Fontainebleau, together with three other smaller communes, form an urban area of 36,713 inhabitants. The two towns sh ...

Publications

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,. * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Dabenton, Edme-Louis French naturalists French ornithologists French entomologists People from Montbard 1730 births 1785 deaths