sketcher, naturalist and collector, was born of a middle-class provincial family in Alençon, Normandy on 23 October 1755. In 1791 he renounced his family name, Houtou, and adopted Labillardière as his sole surname. He studied botany and medicine at Montpellier, completing his studies and graduating as a doctor of medicine in Paris about 1780. After working at the Jardin du Roi with his friend Desfontaines and their patron Le Monnier, Labillardière was sent to England for two years in 1782 to study the plant collections in Kew Gardens. There he met Sir Joseph Banks. Afterwards he collected in the Alps and the Mediterranean, then made a botanical voyage to the Levant in 1786-88 which resulted in the publication of his Icones Plantarum Syriae Rariorum Discriptionibus et Observationibus Illustratae (Paris 1791-94).

Labillardière was appointed naturalist aboard La Recherche , taking part in Admiral Bruni d’Entrecasteaux’s voyage to the Pacific with L’Esp é rance in 1791-94 in search of the explorer La Pérouse. They spent a month charting the coast of Van Diemen’s Land in 1792. On 6 May Labillardière first saw the blue eucalyptus ( Eucalyptus globulus ) subsequently to prove highly adaptable to European conditions when the seeds he had collected were planted in the Empress Josephine’s Malmaison gardens in 1804. Other new eucalyptus species and a little kangaroo, Thylogale billardierii (the Tasmanian pademelon), were also collected on this first visit to Tasmania. On the second, in January-February 1793, the French crews made friendly contact with the Aborigines. The expedition also visited the Western Australian coast, collecting the first Western Australian eucalypt to be described, Eucalyptus cornuta . During the voyage Labillardière collected more than 4,000 plants, as well as animals, fish and birds.

When he returned to France after two years’ confinement at Java between 1793 and 1795, Labillardière discovered that his plant collections had been sent to England as a prize of war. After intercession by Banks they were returned and he set to work on two publications in connection with the voyage. The first was his unofficial 'republican’ version of the expedition, Relation du Voyage à la Recherche de la P é rouse (Paris 1799), comprising two volumes of narrative, including descriptions of the Tasmanian Aborigines, and an atlas containing forty-four plates, mainly ethnographic and natural history illustrations after Piron , and botanical drawings by the young P.J. Redouté (who was to become one of the most famous flower painters of all time). Labillardière’s Voyage appeared nine years before Rossel’s official account and was extremely popular. Four English editions were published in 1800.

Labillardière’s other Australian publication, Prodromus Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen (2 vols, Paris 1804, 1806), contains 265 full-page plates of Australian plants said to have been engraved after Labillardière’s own drawings. The Carrs state that 'In practical terms, this was the first general flora of Australia’, although Labillardière’s accuracy and reliability have long been questioned. His artistic contribution to the work must also be, since any sketches would undoubtedly have been worked up for publication by a professional artist using the specimens collected as the primary source. The illustrator in this case was possibly the prolific French botanical illustrator Pierre Jean François Turpin, known to have produced 6000 botanical illustrations in his lifetime. The library of the Royal Horticultural Society in London (originally the Horticultural Society of London founded by Banks in 1804) holds a copy of Labillardière’s Sertum Austro-Caledonicum (Paris 1824) in which eighty original watercolours of New Caledonian flora by Turpin have been interleaved with the plates.

Labillardière had been made a corresponding member of L’Institut de France Académie Royale des Sciences in 1792 and in 1800 he was elected a full member. A lifelong Republican and anti-Bonapartist, he lived on the outskirts of Paris in retirement until his death on 8 January 1834. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. His name was given to the Australian shrub Billardiera by the English naturalist Robert Brown.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011