Eagle of Thebes, Large Hand-Colored Engraving From Napoleon’s Description De L’Égypte

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Eagle of Thebes, Large Hand-Colored Engraving from Napoleon’s Description de l’Égypte

1809

A life-size eagle, hand-colored, on a sheet nearly … Read more Eagle of Thebes, Large Hand-Colored Engraving from Napoleon’s Description de l’Égypte

1809

A life-size eagle, hand-colored, on a sheet nearly three feet high. The French called this bird l’Aigle de Thèbes, the Eagle of Thebes. This is plate 12 from the bird volume of the Description de l’Égypte — the vast illustrated survey produced by the scholars Napoleon took with him to Egypt — and it is the plate from which the Eastern Imperial Eagle was first described and named in 1809. The bird stands on a broken bough, head turned, in deep chestnut and blackish brown with a pale golden crown and white flashes at the shoulder.

It rewards close looking. The scaled yellow feet and glossy black talons are drawn feather by feather and scale by scale, and the coloring was put on by hand over the printed line. Most of the bird plates from this work were left uncolored, so a finished one like this is the exception rather than the rule. The sheet is untrimmed with its original deckle edges, floated in a wide mount behind glass in a black and burl frame.

At 39 by 31 inches framed it is a statement piece and wants a wall of its own — over a console in an entry, above a bed, at the end of a hallway, or in a study or library where the natural-history subject and the Empire-period pedigree both land. It sits as happily in a modern room as a traditional one; the palette is warm brown and cream, so it works against white, olive, oxblood or ink blue.

Dimensions
Framed height: 39 inches (99.1 cm)
Framed width: 31 inches (78.7 cm)
Framed depth: 1¼ inches (3.2 cm)
Sight height: 30½ inches (77.5 cm)
Sight width: 22¼ inches (56.5 cm)

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge.

Historical Context
The Description de l’Égypte was the published result of the scientific commission that accompanied Bonaparte’s expedition of 1798 to 1801, the work of some 160 scholars and scientists and around two thousand artists, draftsmen and engravers, and the first comprehensive illustrated survey of ancient and modern Egypt and its natural history. The first or Imperial edition of the plates was printed between 1809 and 1829 in an edition of a thousand copies on laid paper watermarked Égypte ancienne et moderne, in formats made expressly for it, and distributed to institutions; its success prompted a second edition from the press of C. L. F. Panckoucke during the Restoration. Savigny, a young zoologist attached to the commission and a specialist in invertebrates, wrote the sections on birds and several other groups; the drawings for the bird plates were made by artists working to his direction, among them Jacques Barraband, and the engravers are named separately on each plate.

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