ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Boucher's participation in the new economy for shells and other objects of natural history that took hold during the eighteenth century. Focusing on a pair of frontispiece illustrations that Boucher designed for two of the period's most important treatises on shells in the pre-Linnaean era of conchology, this chapter shows how Boucher captured the public's imagination for shell collecting. By highlighting the linkages that Boucher established between these frontispieces and his painted and graphic imagery, this chapter argues that Boucher articulated a new and decidedly modern mode of visual representation for collecting natural history objects in mid-eighteenth-century France.
