Edme-Louis Daubenton

Who was Edme-Louis Daubenton?

Edme-Louis Daubenton was a French naturalist.

Edme-Louis Daubenton's tombstone is in the church of Saint-Pierre in Avon. It was Buffon who engaged this cousin of Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton, Edme-Louis, to supervise the colored illustrations for the Histoire naturelle. The "Planches enluminées" started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet, and all painted by hand. The Parisian publisher Panckoucke 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 birds; others illustrate especially butterflies but also other insects, corals, 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 developed by Carl von Linné in 1783, Pieter Boddaert published a table of the correspondence of the names used with their Linnean binomial names.