Image-Making Inside and Outside the Academy: The Artists of the Paris Academy of Sciences

The early Royal Academy of Sciences relied on images in the process of their natural philosophical work. Drawings and prints helped communicate new ideas, inventions, and observations, and they circulated both within Academy meetings and to wider audiences. While many members of the Academy made drawings in the process of their investigations, they relied on professional artists to create engravings for their published works. Some of these images, such as the large engraved plates by Sébastien Le Clerc (1637-1714) were celebrated for their artistic skill as well as scientific accuracy. Yet despite the fame of these images, surprisingly little is known about the how the Academy negotiated their relationship with the artists who created them. Still further, the background and training of these artists have been neglected by scholars, nor has their work outside the Academy been taken into consideration. This paper will explore the relationship between the Academy and the artists they employed in the larger context of their artistic and graphic practices. Le Clerc, as well as Abraham Bosse (1604-1676), Louis de Châtillon (1639-1734), and Nicholas Robert (1614-1685) all created prints for the Academy’s earliest folio volumes in the 1670s. But if Le Clerc’s images were celebrated, ones by the others ran into problems, with the artists and Academicians disagreeing on the best means of representation. This paper will examine how these artists balanced artistic convention and tradition on the one hand, and the patronage demands and expectations on the other – to varying degrees of success.