Tropical Fishes of the East Indies

One of the first depictions of marine fauna comes from Samuel Fallours, whowas in the service of the Dutch East India Company. On the island of Ambon,one of the Moluccas, he made drawings of fish and other marine organisms ofthe Indian Ocean and brought them back to Holland in 1712. His drawingsbelong to a number of sets of similar drawings, depicting hundreds ofanimals, mostly fish but also crustaceans, insects, a dugong, and even amermaid. Some of these became the basis for 18th-century publications,among them Louis Renard's Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes (1719) andFrancois Valentijn's Verhandeling der Ongemeene Visschen van Amboina, achapter in his Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien (1724−1726).These beautiful, elaborately detailed and brilliantly coloreddrawings bear extraordinary witness to the marine fish fauna of the EastIndies and can still be interpreted in light of present-day scientificknowledge.From an artistic and historical viewpoint, these drawings are among thefinest natural history illustrations ever made.