Pierre Lyonnet or Lyonet (21 July 1706 – 10 January 1789) was a Dutch

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 engraver who became a

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 ...

. He was a collector both of shells (a major collecting craze at the time) and paintings, whose collection included '' Woman Reading a Letter'' by

Vermeer Johannes Vermeer ( , ; see below; also known as Jan Vermeer; October 1632 – 15 December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. He is considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch ...

, now in the

Rijksmuseum The Rijksmuseum () is the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch arts and history and is located in Amsterdam. The museum is located at the Museum Square in the borough of Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the S ...

. This fetched far less than his best shells in the auctions of his collection after his death.

Biography

According to the RKD he was a pupil of Hendrik van Limborch,

Carel de Moor Carel de Moor (25 February 1655 – 16 February 1738) was a Dutch Golden Age etcher and painter. He was a pupil of the Dutch Golden Age painting, Dutch Golden Age painter Gerard Dou. Biography Carel de Moor was born in Leiden. According to Hou ...

, and

Jan Wandelaar Jan Wandelaar (14 April 1690, Amsterdam – 26 March 1759, Leiden), was an 18th-century painter, illustrator and engraver from the Dutch Republic. Biography Wandelaar trained under Jacob Folkema, Gilliam van der Gouwen, and Gerard de Lair ...

.Pieter Lyonet
in the

RKD The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD (Dutch: ), previously Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), is located in The Hague and is home to the largest art history center in the world. The center specializes in document ...

He was secretary and translator (he spoke more than eight languages) for the government of the

Dutch Republic The United Provinces of the Netherlands, commonly referred to in historiography as the Dutch Republic, was a confederation that existed from 1579 until the Batavian Revolution in 1795. It was a predecessor state of the present-day Netherlands ...

. Initially he trained as a

lawyer A lawyer is a person who is qualified to offer advice about the law, draft legal documents, or represent individuals in legal matters. The exact nature of a lawyer's work varies depending on the legal jurisdiction and the legal system, as w ...

before choosing to specialize in the engraving of

natural history 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 ...

and the work of

dissection Dissection (from Latin ' "to cut to pieces"; also called anatomization) is the dismembering of the body of a deceased animal or plant to study its anatomical structure. Autopsy is used in pathology and forensic medicine to determine the cause of ...

. He illustrated ''Theology of the insects, or demonstration of the perfections of God in all that relates to the insects'' (1742) of Friedrich Christian Lesser (1692–1754) and ''Treatise on the polyps'' (1744) of

Abraham Trembley Abraham Trembley (3 September 1710 – 12 May 1784 Geneva) was a Genevan naturalist. He is best known for being the first to study freshwater polyps or '' hydra'' and for being among the first to develop experimental zoology. His mastery of exp ...

(1710–1784). He then decided to make his do own observations and to write his own

monograph A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...

on the anatomy of the insects. His first work appeared in 1760 under the name of ''Anatomical treatise of the caterpillar which corrodes the wood of Willow''. He illustrated 4,041 different muscles thus. He lacked the anatomical knowledge of

Jan Swammerdam Jan or Johannes Swammerdam (February 12, 1637 – February 17, 1680) was a Dutch biologist and microscopist. His work on insects demonstrated that the various phases during the life of an insect—Egg (biology), egg, larva, pupa, and adult� ...

(1637–1680) and of

Marcello Malpighi Marcello Malpighi (10 March 1628 – 30 November 1694) was an Italians, Italian biologist and physician, who is referred to as the "founder of microscopical anatomy, histology and father of physiology and embryology". Malpighi's name is borne by ...

(1628–1694) and his observations show it. His book was received with scepticism which affirmed that Lyonnet imagined the details which he drew with so much precision. It was to counter these criticisms, that he put in the second edition which appears in 1762, a drawing of its instruments and a description of its method. Lyonnet planned to study the

chrysalis A pupa (; : pupae) is the life stage of some insects undergoing transformation between immature and mature stages. Insects that go through a pupal stage are holometabolous: they go through four distinct stages in their life cycle, the stages the ...

and the

adult An adult is an animal that has reached full growth. The biological definition of the word means an animal reaching sexual maturity and thus capable of reproduction. In the human context, the term ''adult'' has meanings associated with social an ...

but, sixty years old, the tiredness of his eyes obliged him to stop his projects. Lyonnet was elected a

fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

on 14 January 1748.

References

* ; Illustrations from ''Traité anatomique'' (1750): larva of the willow moth willow moth> Image:Lyonnet 1.jpg, Larva of the willow moth Image:Lyonnet 2.jpg, Central nervous system with the nerves Image:Lyonnet 3.jpg, Muscles Image:Lyonnet 4.jpg, Head Image:Lyonnet 5.jpg, Larva of the willow moth Image:Lyonnet 6.jpg, Lyonet's dissecting outfit

Literature

* Wouter Hendrik van Seters, ''Pierre Lyonet, 1706–1789: Sa vie, ses collections de coquillages et de tableux ses reserches entomologiques'' (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962). * Emile Hublard, ''Le naturaliste hollandais Pierre Lyonet: sa vie et ses oeuvres (1706–1789) d'apres des lettres inédites'' (Brussel: Lebègue, 1910). * Karl Maria Michael de Leeuw, ''Cryptology and statecraft in the Dutch Republic'' (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 2000) . * Koen Scholten, "Pierre Lyonet's (1706–1789) Study of Insects: Displaying Virtue and Gaining Social Status through Natural History", ''Studium'', vol. 11:4 (2018): 245–259. * "Van lezen en microscopen IV: Trembley en Lyonet" (Leiden: Museum Boerhaave, 1978) {{DEFAULTSORT:Lyonnet, Pierre 1706 births 1789 deaths Dutch illustrators Dutch entomologists 18th-century Dutch naturalists Dutch engravers Fellows of the Royal Society Artists from Maastricht Art collectors from The Hague