Jacques le Moyne

Jacques le Moyne de Morgues (c. 1533–1588) was a French artist and member of Jean Ribault's expedition to the New World. His depictions of Native American, colonial life and plants are of extraordinary historical importance.

Biography

Expedition

Until well into the 20th century, knowledge of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues was extremely limited, and largely confined to the footnotes of inaccessible ethnographic bibliographies, where he figures as the writer and illustrator of a short history of Laudonniere's attempt in 1564-5 to establish a Huguenot settlement in Florida. In 1922, however, Spencer Savage, librarian of the Linnean Society, made a discovery that opened the way to the subsequent definition of Le Moyne as an artistic personality; he recognized that a group of fifty-nine watercolors of plants contained in a small volume, purchased by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1856 solely for its fine sixteenth-century French binding, were in fact by Le Moyne. Savage's publications relating to this discovery prepared the way for subsequent attribution to the artist of other important groups of drawings and watercolors, which form the core of his known oeuvre.