SOMETHING’S FISHY: Though many aspects of the drawings in Fishes, Crayfishes and Crabs do not represent reality, more than half of the engravings can be identified to species.WARNOCK LIBRARY AND OCTAVO CORP.In 1685, when Louis Renard was seven or eight years old, he and his family left their native France to settle in the Netherlands, where Huguenots—French Protestants—could worship without fear of persecution. In Amsterdam, Renard led a colorful life as a spy, a seller of patent medicines, and a book publisher until his death in 1746. His only known likeness shows him smoking a pipe in a brothel as scantily clad women parade by.
As the Age of Enlightenment dawned across Europe, Renard published Fishes, Crayfishes and Crabs, of Diverse Colors and Extraordinary Form, That Are Found around the Islands of the Moluccas and on the Coasts of the Southern Lands, his only scientific book. He called it “one of the most precious works to enrich natural history since the birth of literature,” according to a 1984 article published in Natural History magazine by University of Washington professor Theodore Pietsch. Renard’s two-volume tome comprises 100 color plates with 460 individual engravings of fish, crustaceans, stick insects, a dugong, and a mermaid, and includes annotations in French, Dutch, and Malay.
The book also asserts that the engravings are authentic, but Pietsch, whose careful annotation and translation gives vast detail about ...
