Engraving the engraver: Sébastien Leclerc I and the Imprimerie Royale
Discover how the engraver Sébastien Leclerc I used the Planches Gravées de l’Imprimerie Royale to leave a rare glimpse of himself and his deep connection to science.
27 Aug 2025Held by the British Library, the seven volumes of the Planches Gravées de l’Imprimerie Royale [Plates of the Royal Printing House] contain proofs of the plates printed by this printing house between 1640 and 1789.
Across these volumes and their 2338 prints, several names, or at least several signatures, crop up time and time again. Opening the very first volume, we find what comes to be the very reliable signature of Claude Mellan (1598-1688): C Mellan. Others are not as consistent. Karl Audran (1594-1674) took on Carol, Charles, Karolus, without much explanation; Louis Simonneau (1654-1727), when working with a Latin text, signed his name as Ludovicus, a penchant shared by Gilles ‘Aegid’ Rousselet (1610-1686). Others still used shorthand, like Jacques Stella (1596-1675) who favoured his J *. Signatures abound, but rarely do we see the engraver beyond the various and changeable ways they sign their names. Volume 1.2 is the exception.
This volume contains all the prints of the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des animaux, across all its publications (1671, 1676, 1688, and 1733). In Claude Perrault’s magnum opus, we may easily think that the only symbolic print is that of the lion that opens it, referencing Louis XIV’s own attempts to recall the glory of Rome in his image. However, in an unassuming headpiece in the preface, Sébastien Leclerc I (1637-1714) achieved iconographic immortality.
Headpiece from the preface of Claude Perrault’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des animaux by Sébastien Leclerc, c. 1671, found in volume 2.1 of Planches Gravées de l’Imprimerie Royale (1750.c.7).
Portrait of Sébastien Leclerc I, by John Sturt, 1675-1730. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
One of the more prolific engravers of the Ancien Régime, Leclerc produced over 3000 etchings and engravings both with and without royal patronage. Born in Metz in 1637, he began his printing career at seventeen in 1654 to later become the protégé of Charles le Brun, a painter in Louis XIV’s court. As a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture from 1672 and a ‘graveur du roi’ [King’s engraver] from 1693, his is a legacy that has not often been overlooked. However, this self-portrait is still striking among the prints made by the faceless (and sometimes nameless) engravers of the Imprimerie Royale.
The print marks his construction of his own legacy, one not intertwined, as we would expect, with the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, but with the Académie des Sciences. His pictorial inscription into the history of the Académie des Sciences to which he did not formally belong but with which he so often associated then reminds us of his other scholarly love. Whilst engraving gave him fame and (relative) fortune, science also held his heart. This print then reveals what Leclerc, himself, wanted to be remembered for.
Caitlin Sturrock, PhD student at the University of Bristol and PhD placement student in Western Heritage Prints and Drawings.
Further reading
For Leclerc’s other self-referential moments, see Maxime Préaud, Inventaire du fonds français, Graveurs du XVIIe siècle, vol. 8: Sébastien Leclerc I (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1980), pp. 235-58.
Maxime Préaud, ‘« L’Académie des sciences et des beaux-arts » : le testament
graphique de Sébastien Leclerc’, RACAR: Revue d'art canadienne, 10.1 (1983), pp. 73–81. doi:10.7202/1074641ar
For further detail on the volumes, see Caitlin Sturrock, ‘The Scrapbooks of the Imprimerie Royale’, British Library European Studies Blog.
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