Indian Wild Cat and Malacca Civet, Pair of Antique Engravings, 1806

This set of two original antique copper engravings, Plates 88 and 89 from Sonnerat's Voyage aux Indes Orientales et a la Chine, is sold as one set. They are two original sheets sold together as one lot, and the set is never split. Plate 88 shows a wild cat of the Indies marked with black bands along the flanks, standing in profile with a scale bar beneath. Plate 89 shows the civet of Malacca, a long bodied spotted carnivore shown in profile with its banded tail extended. Each sheet carries its engraved plate number at the upper right, the artist and engraver credits at the foot of the image and its caption lettered beneath.

The sheets come from the Collection de planches pour servir au Voyage aux Indes Orientales et a la Chine, the plate volume issued in Paris by Dentu, Imprimeur-Libraire of the quai des Augustins, in 1806. The plates were engraved on copper after drawings Pierre Sonnerat made in the field between 1774 and 1781, while he served the French crown as a naval commissary at Yanam and Pondicherry and traveled on from India to China, Malacca, Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope. The images are copper engravings, printed in black on laid paper with a clear plate mark, the lettering cut below each image in the same plate. No color was applied, which is how the volume was issued.

The mammal plates are the part of the volume that natural history collectors pursue. Several of the animals Sonnerat drew were new to European science when the book appeared, and the Madagascar sheets in particular are among the earliest printed images of their subjects. Both sheets are the same size and the same orientation and come from one volume of one book, which is why they are offered as a set and not one at a time. Pierre Sonnerat, born in Lyon in about 1748 and dead in Paris in 1814, was the nephew and private secretary of Pierre Poivre, the colonial administrator who broke the Dutch monopoly on the spice trade. Sonnerat traveled in the Philippines and the Moluccas, in Mauritius and Reunion, and then through India, China, Malacca, Madagascar and the Cape. He drew what he saw, which is why the plates have a directness that engravings worked up in Paris from other men's notes rarely have.

Light uneven toning, browner towards the edges. Marked handling soiling along the edges of both sheets. Scattered light foxing in the margins of both sheets. Slight wear at the corners of one of the two sheets.

These are original antique prints, not modern reproductions. This item is sold unframed.