tropical fishes of the east indies In the early 1700s,
Samuel Fallours, a soldier-turned-artist for the Dutch East India Company
made hundreds of marine life drawings on the island of Ambon in present-day
Indonesia. Many of those drawings were published by Louis Renard in 1719, in
the world’s first book of color fishes. A striking new book, Tropical Fishes of the
East Indies from Taschen combines the fascinating art, science and whimsical
fish tales of Fallours’ life aquatic.
“They are more beautiful than the parrots, the butterflies, and even the flowers
in our gardens,” Renard wrote in promotion of his 18th century Fallours book.
“Their colors are so vivid that it is like a new miracle of nature.”
The tome features painstakingly faithful reproductions of the originals, down
to the stains, smudges and graduated yellowing of pages. There are even
meticulously created ghost images on the backs of pages where the artist’s ink
was thick and wet enough to bleed through. Even with a manufactured patina,
Fallours’ colors remain bright and clear.
This weighty, 224-page hardcover volume contains a 100-page companion
booklet featuring historical information and images, and an essay by Theodore
W. Pietsch, the University of Washington professor and museum curator who
selected the images to be reproduced.
Despite the collection’s historical and scientific importance, a small
percentage of Fallours’ illustrations veer away from authenticity. He sometimes
drew human faces, flowers, moons or stars on the marine fauna of the Indian
Ocean, or changed their color schemes. He was perhaps more artist than
scientist.
Fishes make up the bulk of the drawings, joined by crustaceans and insects,
a dugong (a kind of sea cow), and mermaid. Readers of French should delight
in Fallours’ hand-written notes—some stretching the truth, others presenting
beautiful lies. The artist claims to have captured a mermaid, which he depicts
in undulating glory across two pages—web-fingered, bare-breasted and
blue-eyed. He boasts that he “lifted her fins in front and back and found her to
be like any other woman.”
The drawings alone make this book interesting, but the imagination (and
sheer dedication) of the artist make it all the more compelling three centuries
after the work was created n Michael Austin, Tropical Fishes of the East Indies,
written by Theodore W. Pietsch, Taschen taschen.com
