Baleine.

Title

Baleine.

Description

Depiction of a whale with whalers, a sailing ship in the background.

ca. 1860

Artist

Traviès de Villers (1809-1876)

Édouard Traviès de Villers ( 1809 – 1876) was a French watercolourist, lithographer and illustrator. He regularly exhibited works at the Paris Salon between 1831 and 1866 and was primarily known for his paintings of natural history subjects, especially birds. His greatest work was Les oiseaux les plus remarquables par leurs formes et leurs couleurs (The most remarkable birds for their form and colour). Simultaneously published in London and Paris in 1857, Les oiseaux contains 79 hand-colored lithographic plates made from Traviès's original paintings. His elder brother was the painter and caricaturist Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers.

Historical Description

Whales are an order of mammals with around 90 species that live exclusively in the water. There are two suborders: the baleen whales, which feed on plankton as filter feeders and are among the largest animals in evolutionary history, and the predatory toothed whales, which also include the dolphin family. In a narrower linguistic sense, the term “cetacean” can include the species known as “dolphins”, so that the entire order is also referred to as “whales and dolphins”. With the exception of individual dolphins and the various groups of river dolphins, cetaceans live in the sea. This group of mammals made the transition to aquatic life around 50 million years ago in the early Eocene. Whales are closely related to even-toed ungulates. The populations of many whale species have declined significantly as a result of environmental pollution, fishing and industrial whaling.