French naturalist, explorer, and painter from Versailles. Pierre Antoine Delalande was the son of a taxidermist in the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. He worked for the museum from a young age, and became the assistant of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. He was also a painter who had trained in the studio of animal painter Jean-Baptiste Berré, situated in the Jardin des Plantes, and who exhibited landscapes and animal paintings in the Salons de Paris. As an employee of the Museum, he accompanied Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1808 on a zoological collecting trip to Portugal, and was sent to the coast of Provence in 1813 to collect fishes and molluscs. In 1816 he embarked with the botanist Auguste Saint-Hilaire on the frigate l'Hermione, which was taking the French Ambassador to Brazil. Once arrived, they collected together in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro. This was the start of de Saint-Hilaire's exploration of South America, which is recounted in his Voyage par les Provinces de Rio de Janeiro et Minas Gerais.
In 1818 Delalande travelled to southern Africa, accompanied by his 12-year-old nephew Jules Verraux. They made three journeys into the interior between November 1818 and September 1820: eastward along the coast from Cape Town; northward to Olifants River; and northeastward from Algoa Bay as far as the Keiskamma River. On his return to France, he presented the Museum with 13,400 zoological specimens, among them its first complete whale skeleton (from a 23 metre beached whale he dissected in situ over a period of two months), as well as giraffes, rhinoceroses, a hippopotamus, and human remains (some of them unearthed from an old cemetery in Cape Town and from the Grahamstown battlefield). He also brought back a mineral collection, 10,000 insects, and an extensive herbarium, although many of his specimens were lost in transit, and all the living plants in his collection were abandoned in Cape Town.
He returned to France with his health badly damaged by tropical infections. For his efforts he received the Legion of Honour, but no financial reward. Shortly before his death, he published an account of his expedition in the museum bulletin, entitled "Precis d'un voyage au Cap de Bonne-Esperance" (Mem. Mus. Hist. Nat. Paris 8, 1822). He is commemorated in Hypericum lalandii Choisy, Tetrapteris lalandiana A.Juss., and in many zoological names.
Sources:
M. Prevost and J. Balteau, 1933, Dictionnaire de Biographie Française: 662-663.
