The Saint Domingue Albums

Title: The Saint Domingue Albums
Date Created: 1766-1784
Creator: René Gabriel de Rabié; Jaquette Anne Marie Rabié de la Boissière; Armand Gabriel Paparel de la Boissière; other unnamed enslaved collaborators
Identifier: Rare Books/Special Collections - Blacker-Wood Illustrations Collection - By Consultation folio M9725 R11
Original Location: Haiti
Current Location: Blacker Wood Natural History Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill Library, Montreal, Quebec
Description: Between 1766 and 1784, René Gabriel de Rabié, an engineer who worked in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti), painted over 320 watercolours of plants and animals. His natural history enterprise was aided by multiple collaborators including his daughter and grandson and numerous unnamed enslaved people who collected and prepared specimens, and assisted in their preservation and depiction. De Rabié identified his specimens using both French and Kréyol names, and provided observations of habitat, distribution and behaviours. His daughter and grandson added glosses to the works, which were bound in Paris in the mid-19th century.
De Rabié was one of a number of French naturalists whose work informed the natural histories of Buffon and the scientists of the Jardin des plantes in Paris. The watercolours themselves survived the depredations of insects and the Caribbean climate, revolutions in Haiti and France, transatlantic crossings, and rejection by the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, to be offered for sale by a rare book dealer in England, where they were examined by a curator at the Smithsonian, and acquired in 1930 by Dr Casey Wood, founder of the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection at McGill University Library in Montreal.
The Saint Domingue Albums are evidence of the intersection of European, Caribbean, and African ways of understanding the natural world. The survival of the watercolours in the albums speak to the importance accorded to the culture of natural history in the colonial French Caribbean.
In collaboration with historians, artists, ornithologists, entomologists, and botanists in Canada, Haiti, the United States, Italy and France, de Rabié’s collection is becoming part of the global history of natural history. Thanks to partnerships with La Sociéte haïtienne d'histoire, de géographie et de géologie and Le Jardin botanique des Cayes (Haiti), it is becoming a resource for the study of Haiti’s history and environment, accessible in English, French and Kreyol.
Credit: René Gabriel de Rabié, Jaquette Anne Marie Rabié de la Boissière, Armand Gabriel Paparel de la Boissière, and unnamed enslaved collaborators, The Saint Domingue Albums, 1766-1784. Blacker Wood Natural History Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal, Canada.
Link: http://mcgill.worldcat.org/oclc/61505881
Contributor: Victoria Dickenson, Professor, McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections