Scientist of the Day - Sébastien Le Clerc

Surveyors at work, detail of an engraving by Sébastien Le Clerc for Mesure de la terre, by Jean Picard, plate 1, in Recueil de plusieurs traitez de mathématique, 1676 (Linda Hall Library)

Sébastien Le Clerc, a French artist, engraver, and mathematician, was born on Sep. 26, 1637, in Metz. His father taught him how to draw and engrave, for which he had a natural talent, and he taught himself math and physics and determined to become an engineer. When his first job as such did not work out, he wound up in Paris in 1665, met a prominent painter who recognized his artistic talent, published a textbook on geometry in 1669, illustrated with his own unique engravings, and was appointed as engraver to the king (Louis XIV) in 1670. Fortune certainly smiled on the young man from Metz.

Portrait of Sébastien Le Clerc, engraving by Claude I Duflos, before 1703, Rijksmuseum (Wikimedia commons)

The man who appointed Le Clerc as Royal engraver, Jean Colbert, the King's Minister of Finance, had organized, 5 years earlier, the Académie royale des Sciences, France's answer to the Royal Society of London (chartered in 1662). One of the most active of the early academicians was Claude Perrault, who got busy dissecting exotic animals, and who needed an artist to draw his animals for publication and somehow stumbled on Le Clerc, who was not yet the Royal engraver. The plates that LeClerc drew and engraved were large and beautiful: we showed some of them in a post on Perrault, and in our first post on Le Clerc.

A surveying instrument, engraving by Sébastien Le Clerc for Mesure de la terre, by Jean Picard, plate 1, in Recueil de plusieurs traitez de mathématique,1676 (Linda Hall Library)

As Royal engraver, Le Clerc was involved in other Academy publications. In the same year that the Mémoires was published, 1676, the Academy published a collection of treatises on mathematical subjects, Recueil de plusieurs traitez de mathématique. The included treatises mostly have their own colophons, with dates from 1671 to 1677, but I do not believe they were published before the Recueil was bound and issued. One of the treatises was by Jean Picard, Mesure de la terre (1671), about an early attempt to measure a degree of latitude at Paris. Le Clerc provided two of the large engravings of instruments, which also showed Picard and his team surveying in the field. We show one of them just above, and a detail as our first image.

Headpiece to Mesure de la terre, by Jean Picard, engraving by Sébastien Le Clerc, in Recueil de plusieurs traitez de mathématique,1676 (Linda Hall Library)

Le Clerc also engraved the striking headpiece for Picard's treatise, depicting some nighttime geodetic work (fourth image). Le Clerc later did similar headpieces for Perrault's Mémoires, and for Denis Dodart's book on plants, both of which you can see in our post on Dodart. Here we show a detail of the Perrault headpiece, which includes Le Clerc’s signature at bottom right (fifth image). It is thought that the figure at upper left in our detail, who holds a sketchbook on his lap and is looking straight at the viewer, is Le Clerc himself.

Detail of headpiece showing anatomists at work, with signature of the engraver, Sébastien Le Clerc, and his self-portrait at upper left, in Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux, by Claude Perrault, p. 1, 1676 (Linda Hall Library)

Le Clerc's first book, Pratique de la géométrie (1669), which he wrote and published before he became Royal engraver, was an unusual introduction to Euclidean geometry, unusual in that each of the definitions, axioms, and postulates was illustrated with a genre engraving of considerable charm. We have the second (1682) edition, and we show two of his small engravings here (it was a small book), one demonstrating the definition of a line, with an impish putto blowing soap bubbles (sixth image), and another showing how to circumscribe a square with a pentagon, which has a detailed and totally irrelevant rural scene below (seventh image).

Euclid’s definition of a line, with Cupid blowing bubbles, engaving by Sébastien Le Clerc, in his Pratique de la géométrie sur le papier et sur le terrain, 2nd ed., p. 11, 1682 (Linda Hall Library)

Circumscribing a pentagon around a square, with rural scene below, engraving by Sébastien Le Clerc, in his Pratique de la géométrie sur le papier et sur le terrain, 2nd ed., p. 161, 1682 (Linda Hall Library)

Le Clerc carried his love for attention to detail into his work for the Academy. For example, the first chapter in Perrault's Mémoires, the article on the lion, begins with an illuminated letter A, showing Adam naming the animals, a tiny engraving that Le Clerc designed himself, and signed (eighth image).

Decorative letter “A,” drawn and engraved by Sébastien Le Clerc, in Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux, by Claude Perrault, p. 1, 1676 (Linda Hall Library)

The preface in this same book ends about halfway down the page, and the empty space is filled with a tailpiece, which, when it has a triangular shape, is called a cul-de-lampe. Ordinarily, printers have a stock of generic cul-de-lampes, which they pull out when space needs to be filled. For this occasion, Le Clerc designed his own, built up from the skeletons of the animals dissected for the book. He signed this as well (ninth image).

Cul-de-lampe, drawn and engraved by Sébastien Le Clerc, in Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux, by Claude Perrault, preface, 1676 (Linda Hall Library)

It is estimated that Le Clerc made some 4000 engravings in his lifetime; we have many other signed engravings of his in various books, and quite a few unsigned engravings that are probably his, but still, that is only a tiny fraction of his total output. And the amazing thing is that his engravings are of such high quality, considering the speed at which he turned them out. His most famous engraving is the one that depicts a fictitious visit of Louis XIV and Colbert to an Academy meeting. We showed the print that appears as a frontispiece to Perrault's Mémoires in our first post on Le Clerc. We show it as our last image here, but we show the print that appears as a frontispiece to the Recueil of 1676, since it is not widely known that it was included as a frontispiece to two books.

Imagined meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, engraved frontispiece by Sébastien Le Clerc, Recueil de plusieurs traitez de mathématique,1676 (Linda Hall Library)

Le Clerc died on Oct. 25, 1714, at the age of 77. He was celebrated in his own lifetime as one of the greatest engravers in France, and there were numerous posthumous engraved portraits in his honor. We do not have any of those, so we used one from the Rijksmuseum as our second image.

William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.