Moorish Idol & Other Exotic Vintage 1990 Fish Print P.J. Buc'hoz

A colour print, rescued from a disbound book of Fish prints from 1990, with unrelated text on the reverse. Original printing date 1778, see text below.

Suitable for framing, image size is approx 7.5" x 12" or 19cm x 30.5cm edge to edge plus small white border.

This is a vintage print not a modern copy and can show signs of age or previous use commensurate with the age of the print. Please view any scans as they form part of the description.

All pictures will be sent bagged and in a board backed envelope for protection in transit.

While every care is taken to ensure my scans or photos accurately represent the item offered for sale, due to differences in monitors and internet pages my pictures may not be an exact match in brightness or contrast to the actual item.

Text taken from the opposite page. Please note this cannot be supplied with the print due to being on the reverse side of the previous print. Any spelling errors are due to the OCR program used.

Moorish Idol and two other Exotic Fish
MOORISH IDOL, Zanclus canescens (top), and two other Exotic Fish. Hand coloured engraving, p1. 8 from Decade 4 of P. J. Buc'hoz's Deuxième Centurie de Planches Enluminées, 1778-81.

It is possible that Louis Renard's curious book Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes, published in 1719, provided the inspiration for these engravings. They have something of the same quality of the illustrations in the earlier work and by 1778 two editions of Renard's book were available for anyone to plagiarise. Pierre Joseph Buc'hoz was a prolific author, but most of his publications were botanical in nature and do not suggest that he knew anything about fish. Like Renard's illustrations his plates are fanciful but at least one of his fish is easily recognised and one of the other two is tantalisingly reminiscent of a known tropical species.
The uppermost figure undoubtedly represents the Moorish Idol, a well-known shallow-water fish from the Indo-Pacific region. The conspicuously extended snout is used to forage for food in the crevices of coral reefs. The name Moorish Idol is said to originate from a belief that the fish is revered by orientals who return it to the water if it is captured. It is a popular aquarium fish but is very difficult to keep alive.
The lower figure has so far refused to give up its identity but the central one may represent a goose scorpionfish, Rhinopiasfrondosa, another Indo-Pacific fish associated with coral reefs. What appear to be stalked eyes may be meant to be the flaps situated above the eyes of this ten-inch-long fish which also has an upwardly turned mouth as suggested by the artist: so these figures may be a little more bizarre than the fish they portray.