Marcus Elieser Bloch Prints

About Marcus Elieser Bloch

Marcus Elieser Bloch was born in Ansbach in 1723 into a poor Jewish family and had little schooling until, as a tutor in Hamburg, he taught himself Latin and the sciences, studied medicine in Berlin and took his doctorate at Frankfurt an der Oder in 1762. He practised as a physician in Berlin, helped found the Society of Friends of Natural Science there in 1773, and in middle age became the leading ichthyologist of the century. His Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische, a general natural history of fishes, appeared in twelve volumes between 1782 and 1795, the first part devoted to the fish of Germany and the later volumes to foreign species sent to him from the East Indies, Suriname and beyond. He published largely at his own expense, with subscribers including the Prussian royal family and the courts of Denmark, Sweden and Poland, and the hand-coloured engraved plates, in which scales are often heightened with silver and gold, are drawn from the specimens themselves. Bloch described at least 267 new species and nineteen genera and assembled nearly 1,400 fish specimens, some 800 of which survive in the Bloch Cabinet of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. He died at Carlsbad in August 1799. The plates present each fish in profile on a bare ground, lit and coloured like a portrait, and that is how they hang: as portraits.