But at least she has those two beautiful birds named in her honor, right?
Well, not exactly.
The dazzling pompadour green pigeons, now considered a complex of half a dozen similar and closely related species, were named in 1776 by the English naturalist and painter Peter Brown.
Why would an Englishman name a Sri Lankan pigeon for a French courtesan, dead these dozen years? He didn’t.
Brown’s description is quite clear: the bird’s name memorializes not the late Marquise, but the shade of the wing coverts, “a fine pompadour color.” True, the color was named for Louis XV’s mistress, but the bird, alas, not.
If the pigeon is attractive, the pompadour cotinga is spectacular.
Both sexes of this species were represented in French collections during Mme de Pompadour’s lifetime, but it was known only by the relatively dull descriptive name “cotinga pourpre,” the purple cotinga.
In the year of the Frenchwoman’s death, Peter Simon Pallas gave the species a Linnaean name, Turdus puniceus, simply a translation of the Brissonian name. But that same year, 1764, George Edwards renamed it in his Gleanings.
Edwards had acquired his specimen in an extraordinary way. Post-Captain Washington Shirley of the British navy, soon to be named Earl Ferrers and eventually made a vice-admiral, captured a French ship — and found among the prize cargo a “curi0us parcel of Birds” said to be addressed to Mme de Pompadour herself. Edwards was given access to the specimens, at least two of which he described. This one
being a Bird of excessive beauty, I hope that Lady will forgive me for calling it by her name,
“The Pompadour.”
I do not know whether she ever saw Edwards’s portrait of the bird or read the slightly back-handed compliment in his description. If she did, I suspect she might rather have had her bird skins.
