Samuel Fallours’ Surreal Fish Art: part 2

Because of this judicious use of artistic license and the general unfamiliarity an early 18th-century Dutchman would have had regarding the reef fishes of Indonesia, an effort had to be made on the part of Renard to verify the legitimacy of the work he was about to...

Samuel Fallours’ Surreal Fish Art: part 1

The illustrations featured in this article represent the earliest color images of Indo-Pacific coral reef fishes ever to be printed. They originate from a compendium on the marinelife of Indonesia published in Amsterdam in 1719 by a part-time pharmacist/British spy...

Marcus Elieser Bloch’s 18th Century Fish Art

The study of coral reef fishes is a relatively recent field within ichthyology. The earliest scientific works, by naturalists such as Artedi, Linnaeus and Forsskål, consisted of little more than a series of terse morphological descriptions, completely lacking any...