| |
| 1662 |
The Royal Society is founded in London. |
| 1665 |
The first periodical in Europe, Journal des sçavans, is published, followed several months later by Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in England. |
| 1666 |
Christopher Merrett, a British physician, publishes Pinax rerum naturalium
Britannicarum, considered by some the first classical British bird book. In it
the classification of species follows the systems of Aldrovandi and Jonston. |
| 1675 |
David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, a German artist who paints portraits and history paintings, becomes a court painter in Sweden. His biologically instructive painting of lekking grouse, Blackcocks in Springtime (Orrspel) (Plate 68), is
highly praised. |
| 1676 |
Francis Willughby, an English zoologist, teams up with John Ray, an English
botanist, to describe the entirety of nature. Their classification system, based on
habitat, size, and appearance, supersedes the classification system established by
the encyclopedist Aldrovandi and paves the way for Mathurin-Jacques Brisson;
Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon; Carolus Linnaeus; and scientific classification generally. Willughby, who dies in 1672, leaves a life income to Ray, who
publishes their work as Ornithologiae in 1676. The book describes 230
British birds. |
© 2008 Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy |
|
| 1702 |
François Desportes, a popular mainstream French artist, specializes in still
lifes, larder art, and images of hunting trophies. He excels at portraying plum
age. Louis XIV names Desportes the o;cial painter of the Royal Hunt and
commissions him to record his menagerie. Desportes is often compared with
Jean-Baptiste Oudry and is also associated with the Gobelins and Beauvais tap
estry factories, which produce Europeanized versions of flora and fauna of the
New World. |
| c. 1705 |
Maria Sibylla Merian, a German natural history artist specializing in insects,
travels to Surinam, publishing on her return Metamorphosis insectorum Surina-
mensium (c. 1705). It includes some birds, showing aspects of their biology. Merian mixes accuracy and aesthetics, setting a standard for scientific illustration
that influences, for example, Eleazer Albin, Carolus Linnaeus, Mark Catesby,
and Charles Willson Peale. |
| 1709 |
Kaibara Ekiken, perhaps the first major Japanese ornithologist, publishes the
21-volume Yamato honzo (The Natural History of Japan) in 1709. The volume
dedicated to birds covers 99 species systematically and sets the standard in
Japan for a century. |
| 1711 |
Carl Wilhelm de Hamilton, a Scottish- Flemish animal painter, produces two versions of The Parliament of Birds based on a poem by Chaucer that describes
avian mate-selection as an orderly event occurring on Saint Valentine's Day |
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