Tropical Fishes of the East Indies
Some of the world's earliest illustrations of marine fauna were created by Samuel Fallours at the start of the 18th Century. Fallours worked for the Dutch East India Company in the Moluccas, where he drew fish and other marine organisms of the Indian Ocean. He returned to Holland in 1712 bringing his drawings with him.
These beautiful, elaborately detailed and brilliantly coloured drawings provide an extraordinary description of marine fish fauna of the East Indies and are proving useful to modern day scientists in comparisons with present-day scientific knowledge. From an artistic and historical viewpoint, these drawings are among the finest natural history illustrations ever made.
Samuel Fallours was probably born in Rotterdam. He sailed in 1703 to Batavia where he stayed until at least the close of 1705. From September 1706 to June 1712, he was the Associate Curate.
Theodore W. Pietsch is Professor in the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, and Curator of Fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, University of Washington in Seattle. While his primary interest is marine ichthyology, he has published extensively on the history of ichthyology and its seminal figures, including Louis Renard, Samuel Fallours, Charles Plumier, and Georges Cuvier.
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