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.
This game was developed as part of the publicity campaigns to build the "shipmindedness" of the modern United States under the auspices of the U.S. Shipping Board. This civilian board oversaw the massive ship building program of 1917–20 to support the entry of the U.S. into WWI; after the Armistice it promoted a maritime vision of the modern world.
Geographical and economic games were an established genre in the 19th and early 20th century. This game is noteworthy for its promotion of technological change and the modern conditions of shipping—it was the opposite of nostalgic visions of geographical exploration or the dangers and adventures of a sailor's life.
This plate, produced specifically for the Cape in Canton around the 1740s, stands out conspicuously among the William Fehr collection, inviting us to explore a largely forgotten, centuries-long connection between colonial southern Africa and the Chinese cultural world. The plate’s Cantonese painters participated in the messy transoceanic chains of production that shaped such ‘entangled objects’. They interpreted an African environment, sketched by Dutch illustrators, through the lens of Chinese expectations of elite European consumers’ tastes. The plate exemplifies Giorgio Riello’s observation that material culture can help re-articulate ‘our spatial understanding of the past in ways that are not necessarily apparent in documentary sources’.
It depicts Cape Town’s iconic landscape as seen from a Table Bay littered with Dutch ships, combining several seemingly unrelated visual cultures. For example, the ‘tablecloth’ covering Table Mountain – the feature after which the Khoekhoe named the place ǁHui ǃGaeb (‘the place where the clouds meet’) – is portrayed as Chinese xiangyun (‘auspicious clouds’) over a shanshui (‘mountain and water’) scene, while the sea and sky resemble washed-out European watercolours. The scene is framed by laub-und-bandelwerk in gold and black, which was characteristic of Viennese porcelain in the 1730s, itself inspired by French Baroque aesthetics, and topped with unidentified arms.
