Jean Baptiste Audebert (1759 – December 1800) was a French

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...

and

naturalist Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is cal ...

Life

Audebert was born at

Rochefort Rochefort () may refer to: Places France * Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, in the Charente-Maritime department ** Arsenal de Rochefort, a former naval base and dockyard * Rochefort, Savoie in the Savoie department * Rochefort-du-Gard, in the G ...

. He studied painting and drawing at

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

, and gained reputation as a miniature-painter. Employed in preparing plates for the ''Histoire des cloportes'' of

Guillaume-Antoine Olivier Guillaume-Antoine Olivier (; 19 January 1756, Les Arcs near Toulon – 1 October 1814, Lyon) was a French entomologist and naturalist. Life Olivier studied medicine in Montpellier, where he became good friends with Pierre Marie Auguste Br ...

, he acquired a taste for natural history. His first original work, ''Histoire naturelle des singes'' appeared in 1800, illustrated by sixty-two folio plates, drawn and engraved by himself. The coloring in these plates was unusually beautiful, and was applied by a method devised by himself. His work was also included in the bestselling '' Relation du Voyage à la Recherche de la Pérouse''. Audebert died in Paris, leaving complete materials for another work, ''Histoire des colibris, oiseaux-mouches, jacamars et promerops'', which was published in 1802. Two hundred copies were printed in folio, one hundred in large quarto, and fifteen were printed with the whole text in letters of gold. Another work, left unfinished, was also published after the author's death, ''L'Histoire des grimpereaux et des oiseaux de paradis''. The last two works also appeared together in two volumes, ''Oiseaux dorés, ou à reflets métalliques'' (1801-1802), written with his friend

Louis Pierre Vieillot Louis Pierre Vieillot (10 May 1748, Yvetot – 24 August 1830, Sotteville-lès-Rouen) was a French ornithologist. Vieillot is the author of the first scientific descriptions and Linnaean names of a number of birds, including species he collected ...

. In this work he printed lines of gold and silver over the painted colours of the birds to give them a metallic sheen imitating the iridescent colours of nature.

References

Attribution: *

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Audebert, Jean-Baptiste French naturalists Audebert, Jean Baptiste Audebert, Jean Baptiste French bird artists People from Rochefort, Charente-Maritime 18th-century French illustrators