Art Jungle
Cart
AbstractBotanicalClassicsIllustrationsNature & LandscapesExclusiveVintage PostersJapanAll PrintsAll Categories

Louis Renard

Louis Renard’s “Poissons, écrevisses et crabes” (Amsterdam, 1719) was one of the first colour books on fish. Its plates show brightly coloured, partly fantastical fish, crabs and crustaceans of the East Indies, among them fishes of Ambon and the Moluccas, a ray and tree crabs.

Colour

Showing 1–24 of 27

About Louis Renard

Renard was a publisher in Amsterdam, and his book drew on drawings made on Ambon, in the Moluccas, where the Dutch East India Company had a base. The artist Samuel Fallours worked there, and some creatures in the book, a mermaid among them, owe more to invention than to observation.

Most plates stack several fish one above another, their bodies covered in stripes and spots of strong colour. Crustaceans have plates of their own, among them the “Crabbe-Scorpion” and “Craka Coulat and Crake Radja”, and one sheet places a grasshopper among the crabs. The names come from the captions: “Keyser van Iapan” is Dutch for “Emperor of Japan”. Renard’s plates are reproduced as giclée prints with pigment inks, made to order in Berlin on matte 210 g/m² fine art paper or 400 g/m² cotton canvas, in sizes A4 to A0.