TRAVIES, Edouard (French, 1809 - 1870).
Canards sauvages, mâle, femelle (Wild Ducks, Male and Female) [Mallard, Anas platyrhynchos].
Watercolor, pencil, and gouache on paper with pasted paper watercolor drawing of waterfowlers in a boat.
Original watercolor for Les Oiseaux les plus remarquables par leurs formes et leurs couleurs (The Most Remarkable Birds for Their Forms and Colors).
Inscribed “Canard sauvages/ male – femelle/ 42/ Edouard Travies. Term. Le 1 Mai 1850”.
1850.
12” x 14 1/2” sheet, 31 1/4” x 24 1/4” framed.

Born in Doullens, in the Somme region of northern France, Édouard Traviès de Villers (1809–1870) was among the foremost natural history illustrators of nineteenth-century France. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon between 1831 and 1866 and contributed plates to René-Primevère Lesson's Compléments de Buffon (1838), the supplement to the Comte de Buffon's monumental Histoire naturelle (Natural History). His elder brother, Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers, was also a noted painter and caricaturist. Traviès's magnum opus, Les Oiseaux les plus remarquables par leurs formes et leurs couleurs (The Most Remarkable Birds for Their Forms and Colors), was published simultaneously in Paris and London in 1857 and comprised seventy-nine hand-colored lithographic plates drawn from his own watercolors. He was among the earliest natural history artists to situate his subjects within fully realized habitats rather than against a blank ground, an approach that anticipated the modern field guide and shaped ornithological illustration well into the twentieth century. Canards sauvages, mâle, femelle (Wild Ducks, Male and Female) [Mallard, Anas platyrhynchos] was prepared as a working drawing for that landmark publication.

Traviès's inscription identifies the pair as "Canards sauvages, mâle, femelle" (Wild ducks, male, female),[^2] the traditional French vernacular for the Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos). The drake at left displays the pale, finely vermiculated gray flanks, chestnut breast, and iridescent green head of the species in full breeding plumage. The hen at right shows the mottled brown body typical of the female, though Traviès has emphasized the pale supercilium and eye stripe more strongly than is typical in life. This was a common stylistic choice in nineteenth-century natural history illustration, intended to render the species' diagnostic features more legible when translated into a published lithographic plate. The artist added "Term." to the title in the lower left, an abbreviation of the French terminé (completed).

Lightly visible grid lines across the composition indicate that this is a working study, squared up for transfer to a finished print or larger composition. The hunting scene in the upper background, depicting waterfowlers in a punt with raised guns and a lone duck on the open water, has been executed separately and pasted onto the sheet, evidence that the artist revised the design during its development. The accompanying flora, including willows, cattails, and marsh marigolds, reinforces Traviès's commitment to habitat-based depiction.

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