Antique French de Buffon Bird Engraving, Le Calao, Hand Colored, 18th Century

Period
1770 to 1783, French

Size
9¼ x 11½ inches, framed

A hand colored copperplate engraving of a hornbill, from Buffon's Histoire naturelle, drawn by Jacques de Sève and engraved by Jean Mansard. Marked pl. 7872.

The bird is perched on a rock in profile, the body in dense blue black, the outsized bill carried forward with a heavy casque rising along the top of it. The rocks and scrub of the foreground are worked in olive and gray, and a hill closes the distance. The casque is given the most attention on the plate, drawn with the ridging and the color break rendered carefully where the rest of the setting is summary.

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
Calao is the French name for the hornbills, a family of Africa and tropical Asia. The structure on top of the bill is a casque, hollow in most species and built on a honeycomb of bone, which is why so large a projection is carried without weighing the head down. Birds of this kind reached Europe only as skins and as the occasional live import, so the plates were drawn from dead specimens and the postures reconstructed.

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.