French botanist employed at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. Sébastien Vaillant was born at Vigny, Val d'Oise, and studied medicine at Pontoise. From 1688 he practised as a surgeon in Évreux, then in the army and at Neuilly, before moving to Paris and studying botany at the Jardin des Plantes under Joseph Pitton de Tournefort.
Exhibiting a great aptitude for the subject, he was appointed a curator of living collections at the Jardin des Plantes in 1700 and in 1708 became sous-démonstrateur. It was in this period that he began to use analogies with animal reproduction to describe plant reproduction, and in 1714 was responsible for the building of a greenhouse in which to cultivate tender succulents, the first such glasshouses to be built in France. Two years later he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences.
All the while, Vaillant had been working on his life's oeuvre, Botanicon Parisiense, enumerating and illustrating the plants of Paris. The work was incomplete at the time of his death, when the illustrations were with the celebrated botanical painter Claude Aubriet (1665-1742). William Sherard had seen the drawings in 1717 and was much impressed with them, and it was through his encouragement that the Dutch botanist Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) took receipt of the manuscript and completed it for publication in 1727. The engraver Jan Wandelaar, who also worked on Linnaeus' Hortus Cliffortianus, was employed to create the plates. A pioneering volume, it introduces the terms stamen and ovary as they are now used. Linnaeus was inspired by Vaillant's ideas about the sexual nature of reproduction in plants and named the genus Valantia L. in his honour (Vaillant's named was sometimes latinized as Valantius).
Sources:
J.E. Dandy, 1958, The Sloane Herbarium: 226
J. Rousseau, 1970, "Sébastien Vaillant : an outstanding 18th century botanist", Regnum Vegetabile, 71
W.L. Tjaden, 1976, "Sebastien Vaillant's Flora of Paris, Botanicon Parisiense, 1727", Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, 8: 11-27.
