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Madame Lavoisier and the Traité élémentaire de chimie
In his Traité élémentaire de chimie [Elements of chemistry] of 1789, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier laid the foundations of the “new chemistry.” With its clear structure and straightforward style, this chemical treatise became a huge success. One of the things that stands out most to the modern reader, however, is the skill illustrated in the fine engravings which accompany Lavoisier’s groundbreaking experiments on oxygen. These pictures were produced by the chemist’s wife, Marie-Anne Lavoisier. In a sense, Traité is the offspring of the otherwise childless marriage of the Lavoisiers.
This book is part of the Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library at CHF.
A match made in the laboratory
Like many of her contemporaries, Marie-Anne Pierette Paulze entered society after living a relatively sheltered life. At the age of 13 she must have been apprehensive when her father, a recent widower, proposed that she marry one of his colleagues at the central French tax-collecting authority. Her future husband, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, was 15 years her senior. Fortunately, her extensive education (at a convent and at home), her practical skills, and her interests in science, were a perfect match for her husband’s talents. When Lavoisier was appointed gunpowder administrator and pursued his interests in chemistry further, she observed his progress in the chemical laboratory with a keen eye and a quick mind.
A sketchy affair: Madame Lavoisier’s engravings
When Madame Lavoisier accompanied her husband to his laboratory, she had the task of documenting weights and measurements in his experiments. But she did much more than just keep notes: she had a gift for drawing, which she improved with the help of her famous teacher, the artist Jacques-Louis David. Her sketches and watercolors of scenes and objects in the chemical laboratory soon became more than a private pursuit. For the publication of Traité élémentaire de chimie they were transformed into engravings: drawings scraped into metal plates which, when brushed with ink and pressed on paper, could reproduce the same image an almost infinite number of times with great clarity.
Madame Lavoisier not only drew on scenes from the laboratory but also scenes from the rapidly changing world around her. Although her images are now more than 200 years old, they still evoke the chemistry that took place during the French Revolution from the perspective of an eyewitness.
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| Bellows in Lavoisier's lab. For each image, Madame Lavoisier drew a sketch on paper, translated it into a line drawing, and then scraped that onto a metal plate. She used printed samples to communicate with the printer about improvements. Her notes to the printer still exist, and are kept at Cornell University. |
Translation matters
Madame Lavoisier also had excellent language skills. Her translations of Irish chemist Richard Kirwan’s books on phlogiston and acids were published around the same time as Traité élémentaire de chimie. She regularly helped her husband communicate with international scholars, translating highly technical correspondence with remarkable ease and elegance. Thus, in her artwork and translations Madame Lavoisier communicated scientific knowledge to men all over the world.
Headless conclusion
During the height of the French Revolution Lavoisier was sentenced to death by guillotine for his past career as a tax collector and as a prominent member of the pre-revolutionary government. His wife of 23 years made it clear that she would not let the world forget about either Lavoisier or his achievements. She edited and published her husband’s memoirs, and when she remarried a decade after Lavoisier’s death, she referred to herself as “Madame Lavoisier de Rumford,” loyally keeping her first husband’s name. The second marriage was a short and unhappy one, and Madame Lavoisier outlived her second husband by 22 years.
We will never know how she perceived her life when she left it at the age of 78. Yet we do know how she saw the new chemistry emerge around her: a world she captured in her excellent engravings.
View the book
The Othmer Library's online catalog has both the second issue of the first edition of the Traité élémentaire and the second edition, published in the same year (1789).
Related items from the Othmer Library's catalog:
- Portraits of the Lavoisiers and the image showing Madame Lavoisier at work are contained in Édouard Grimaux, Lavoisier: 1743-1794 d'après sa correspondance, ses manuscrits, ses papiers de famille et d'autres documents inédits (Paris, 1888)
- Works translated by Madame Lavoisier are Richard Kirwan, Essay on phlogiston, and the constitution of acids (French: Essai sur le phlogistique, et sur la constitution des acides ( Paris , 1788)
and the same author’s Of the strength of acids, and the proportion of ingredients in neutral salts (French: De la force des acides, et de la proportion des substances qui composent les sels neuters (prob. Paris, 1792)
- Madame Lavoisier also edited her husband’s memoirs: Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Mémoires de chimie (Paris, 1805)
- A biography of Madame Lavoisier was written by François Guizot: Madame de Rumford, 1758-1836 (Paris, 1841)
Related articles and publications
- "Women Authors in the Neville Library", by Mary Ellen Bowden and Tanya Avakian. Chemical Heritage, Vol. 24, No.2. A number of French women authors, including Madame Lavoisier, made significant
contributions to Enlightenment science. Our historian surveys their works in CHF’s collections.
- Lavoisier: Chemist, Biologist, Economist, by Jean-Pierre Poirier; revised and translated, with a preface by Charles C. Gillispie. 1998. This comprehensive biography covers Lavoisier's role in French economic thought
and politics as well as chemistry, and treats Marie Lavoisier as a figure in her
own right.
- Learn more about Antoine Lavoisier
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