Mast Tree and Digitate-Leaved Cavalam, Pair of Antique Plates, 1806

This set of two original antique copper engravings, Plates 131 and 132 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 131 shows the mast tree, a flowering branch with dense clusters of starry flowers, the long lanceolate leaves rising above and the fruit drawn in section. Plate 132 shows the cavalam with digitate leaves, a branch with long stalked compound leaves and spotted bell shaped flowers hanging in clusters. 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.

These plates belong to the Collection de planches pour servir au Voyage aux Indes Orientales et a la Chine, published in Paris by Dentu in 1806. It is the plate volume that accompanies Sonnerat's account of the years he spent in India, China, Malacca, Madagascar and the islands of the Indian Ocean as a naturalist and naval commissary in the service of France. 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 botanical plates close the volume and are the quietest sheets in it. Sonnerat drew the useful and the strange: the spice plants, the fruit trees and the flowering trees of the Indian Ocean, generally with a fruit or a flower taken apart and drawn separately so that the structure can be read. 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. What Sonnerat produced was not a studio compilation. He was in India for seven years, based at Yanam and at Pondicherry, and he went on to Canton, to Malacca, to Madagascar and to the Cape of Good Hope. The drawings he brought back were engraved in Paris by Jean-Baptiste Marie Poisson, Jean-Jacques Avril, Desmoulins, Fessart and Milsan, among the better reproductive engravers working in the city at the end of the eighteenth century.

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. All corners complete on every sheet.

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