Tag: pigeons

Not every cause remains célèbre, but birders still recall, more than two centuries on, the noisy falling out between Coenraad Jacob Temminck and Pauline Knip, erstwhile collaborators on one of the loveliest of the illustrated bird books of the early nineteenth century.

Antoinette-Pauline-Jacqueline Rifer de Courcelles was born in Paris in July 1781; her marriage to the landscape painter Joseph Knip (he alone rates a Wikipedia article, by the way) ended in divorce, but she kept his name until her death in April 1851. A student of Pierre-Paul Barraband, Mme Knip specialized, like so many of her gifted female contemporaries, in scientific illustration, but, as a later biographer observed,

One has nevertheless encountered true artists in that inferior genre, to which they gave unexpected worth thanks to the genuineness of their exceptional talents. Mme de Courcelles, for example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, while drawing and painting only birds, still managed to deserve a distinguished place among the artists of her day…. Even if one had no interest whatsoever in ornithology, no one could regret the time spent leafing through her splendid volumes.

In 1805, the artist provided the plates for Desmarest’s Histoire naturelle des tangaras, des manakins et des todiers, and three years later, she and Temminck began the publication of their Pigeons.

These pigeons, from our turtle doves and wood pigeons to the singular species of the tropics, they coo, they puff with pride; their wings life, their delicate and changeable colors shimmer in the sun; ingenious touches make the air and the light play among their silky plumes; their round eyes, even in the brute immovability, have the brightness and transparency of life…. Nothing better has ever been done in this genre.

It is not for her artistic skill that she is remembered, however. Elliott Coues tells the story: Les pigeons 

is one of the curiosities of literature…. The work was originally published in 15 livraisons, 1808-1811. At the ninth livraison, Madame Knip accomplished a piece of truly feminine finesse, by which she stole it from Temminck.

Knip intervened with the printer to change the cover of that ninth fascicle to make it seem that she was alone the author; apparently, to conceal her treachery, some copies were produced and sent to Temminck with his name on the title page. When the fifteenth was issued, though, she informed the binders that they were to omit all mention of Temminck, including the introduction and index he had written, “a bold trick, regardless of consequences,” says Coues.

What may have gone on under the surface would doubtless be even more curious….

Temminck himself identifies Knip’s motive:

The work she had thus mutilated was presented to her imperial highness Marie Louise, with the effect of gaining for Mme Knip the gratifying results her ambition had long coveted.

Only when he visited Paris from Leiden did Temminck find out what had happened. It was too late:

Every effort made to appeal against her arbitrary actions was useless, and it was not possible to raise my voice then against intrigues supported by such powerful protectors [namely, Napoleon and his second empress]; editors refused to publish my side in their papers, even in reply to an article published by [Mme Knip as] the new author.

I haven’t seen that article of Knip’s. Coues could not find it, either, and it is unmentioned in the most recent scholarship on l’affaire Knip and Temminck; it likely tells the story from a very different angle, one no doubt more sympathetic to the painter than the past two centuries of history and “delightful … gossip” have been.