Antique French de Buffon Bird Engraving, La Veuve à Quatre Brins, Hand Colored, 18th Century

Period
1770 to 1783, French

Size
9¼ x 11½ inches, framed

A hand colored copperplate engraving of the four-strand whydah, from Buffon's Histoire naturelle, drawn by Jacques de Sève and engraved by Élisabeth Haussard. Marked pl. 6659.

The bird is perched on a branch in profile, small bodied, with four long narrow tail shafts running down and away behind it, the plumage in dark blue black over a lighter breast. The branch and its leaves are drawn tight around the bird and the ground behind is left open, so the length of the tail reads against nothing and takes the eye down the sheet.

The paper has warmed to ivory with scattered foxing through the margins. The frame is painted blue gray with a yellow ochre inner fillet, distressed to bare wood at the corners and along the rails. Sold as found.

Historical Context
Élisabeth Haussard was born in Paris in 1700, the youngest daughter of the engraver Jean-Baptiste Haussard, and worked from his shop alongside her older sister Catherine. The two of them cut plates for the great technical and scientific publications of the century, including the treatises on drapery, locksmithing and carpentry by Duhamel du Monceau and Roubo. She was still signing plates in her old age and lived to 1804, past a hundred. Women worked in the Paris engraving trade in real numbers in the eighteenth century, usually inside a family shop, and signed their own plates.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, ran the Jardin du Roi in Paris and gave the rest of his life to the Histoire naturelle, thirty-six volumes published between 1749 and his death in 1788, with eight more added afterward by his successors. He wrote it in French and aimed it at any educated reader, and the first edition sold out in six weeks and went on into English, German, Swedish, Italian and Russian. The nine volumes on birds were written with Guéneau de Montbeillard, and Jacques de Sève drew close to two thousand plates across the whole work.