SAUVIGNY, Louis-Edme Billardon de (1738-1812): Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine. Accompagnée d'Observations & d'Anecdotes relatives aux Usages, aux Mœurs & au Gouvernement de cet Empire. Paris, De l'Imprimerie de Louis Jorry, 1780. I

Description:

Paris: De l'Imprimerie de Louis Jorry, 1780.
35 x 26 cm
Extremely rare first edition in French, published in 1780, the first monograph on goldfish printed in the West. Original leather binding of brown, marbled leather with decorative gilt borders on the front and back covers. On the spine, the title “Dorades de La Chine” appears in gold lettering on red-dyed leather. The endpapers and pastedowns are decorated with marbled paper, followed by a double page with the title on the right; on the verso of the title page appears a poem by Voltaire on the left and a hand-coloured copperplate engraving with a titled cartouche on the right. The publisher and title pages with date are missing. Frontispiece with a portrait of Emperor Kin-Long (Qianlong) as a hand-coloured copperplate. Thirty-two numbered pages of text contain observations and detailed descriptions of the Chinese Empire, its government, customs and religion, as well as a brief account of fish.
This is followed by forty-eight remarkable copperplate engravings, intaglio prints by François-Nicolas Martinet, engineer and engraver at the Royal Cabinet, active between 1760 and 1804, which are not bound in their original order. They are numbered 1 to 48 and depict 88 variations of carp species (Cyprinidae) from seven types, the Kin-yu, the most common species, the Ya-tan-yu, “Cannon Egg”, the Long-Tsing-yu, “Dragon Eyes”, the Choni-yu, “Sleeper”, the Kin-teon-yu, “Thief”, the Niu-eubk-yu, “Nymph” and the Ouen-yu, “Scholar Fish”, each hand-coloured in various shades of orange, brown, red and pink on a water-green background, some with silver and gold highlights.
The goldfish is descended from the gibel carp and was already domesticated in China in the 10th century. Due to its beauty and variety of forms, it has long been highly prized by emperors and high-ranking Chinese dignitaries. Originally, goldfish lived in breeding ponds and decorative basins, their size strongly dependent on the volume of water. In the 17th century, goldfish were introduced to Europe by the Portuguese. About a century later, the first known specimens reached France, arriving in Lorient. It is said that directors of the French East India Company presented some goldfish to the Marquise de Pompadour. It was only in the 18th century that it became common to keep goldfish in porcelain vessels. Notably, the death of the cat Selima in February 1747 in such a vessel inspired Thomas Gray in 1748 to write his Ode On the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold-Fishes. Modern aquaristics developed only in the 19th century.
Louis-Edme Billardon de Sauvigny, circa 1736-1812, created the work based on a manuscript notebook and a Chinese handscroll executed by imperial court painters in 1722. Some of the plates were copied directly from this approximately twenty-foot-long scroll. These valuable documents once belonged to Henri-Léonard Bertin, 1720-1794, Minister under Louis XV and a prominent Sinologist, and in 1772 were sent to the Minister by Aloys Ko, Gao Ren, 1732-1790, and Étienne Yang, Yang Zhide, 1733-1798, two Chinese seminarians who had studied in France at the Jesuit colleges La Flèche and Louis-le-Grand in 1752 and returned to China in the late 1760s. The manuscripts are now preserved in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris under the shelfmark Ms 5066.
The plates were copied from this scroll and executed with perfect craftsmanship, as Sauvigny emphasises in his preface: “We believe we can safely say that the engraving and colouring by M. Martinet have made the copies far superior to the original drawings. It seems that the artist, who had already earned great distinction in the Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux, has surpassed himself in an even more difficult genre.”
From an important Bavarian private collection - The work is extremely rare and appears to be one of the most complete editions. In the past, only four partially incomplete copies have been recorded on the auction market: Christie’s, London, Sale 21033 in 2022, 13 July, Lot 219; Binoche et Giquello, Sale 26074 in 2016, Lot 58, EUR 40,322.50; Christie’s New York, 17 May 1991, Lot 8; and Sotheby’s, 24 January 1949, Lot 286. In addition, three further copies or fragments are held in public collections, including Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and the Ewell Sale Stewart Library & Archives. The edition from the Harvard archive is very similar to the present copy and was reprinted by ULAN Press.
The book shows minimal signs of age, with a few minor stains in places. The binding has minor restoration, and the final pages show some small wormholes in the paper