Biography

French botanist. Louis-Claude Richard was born into a family of royal gardeners at Versailles. His great-grandfather had been in charge of Louis XIV's menagerie, and his grandfather and father were the head gardeners respectively at Trianon and Auteuil at the time of his birth. While Richard was growing up at Trianon, Michel Adanson was in residence as royal botanist and Bernard de Jussieu was director of the garden.

Richard desired nothing more than to follow in the family tradition, but his father worried that horticulture was not a secure profession and sent him to college, where his intelligence and talent for drawing was noted by the Archbishop of Paris, who offered his protection to the boy on the condition he take holy orders. Against his father's wishes Richard refused to enter the clergy and, at the age of 14, left for Paris to attend courses at the College de France and the Jardin du Roi, earning his living by drawing garden plans for architects. In 1781 he was sent to French Guiana by the French government to cultivate spice plants introduced by Sonnerat and Poivre and to explore the botany of the colony and its neighbouring countries. But, on arrival in Cayenne, he found himself barred from entering the botanical garden where he had been made director, because the governor was using it to grow vegetables. He had to wait for several years before this governor was replaced and he could take charge of the botanical garden and start cultivating the many species collected on his explorations all over French Guiana and parts of Brazil and the Antilles.

In 1789, after eight years away, Richard returned to France with a large collection of natural history specimens and drawings, including a herbarium of 4,000 specimens and a spectacular collection of molluscs. He felt like a stranger in his own country however, and during the Revolution became profoundly reclusive. His situation improved in 1795 when he was elected to the Académie des Sciences and named professor of botany at the École de Medicine, where he founded a botanical garden and began working with rare and exotic plants, notably orchids. But like his two mentors, Adanson and Jussieu, he produced few publications from his botanical research. He did, however, collaborate with André Michaux on the Flora Boreali-Americana (1803) and completed his master work, Demonstrations Botaniques (1808), one of the era's most important treatises on fruit, De Orchideis Europaeis (1817), Commentatio Botanica de Conifereis et Cycadeis (1826) and De Musaceis Commentatio Botanica (1831) were published posthumously by his son, Achille, a physician and botanist, who succeeded him at the medical school. The genus Richardia Kunth, nom. illeg. non L. (1753) in the Araceae was dedicated to him, but is a synonym of Zantedeschia Spreng. (1826) (nom. cons.).

Sources:
B. Dayrat, 2003, Les Btanistes et la Flore de France: trois siècles de découvertes: 171-176
M.P. Sørensen, 1995, "Les voyageurs artistes en Amerique du Sud au XVIII siècle", in Y. Laissus (ed), Les Naturalistes Français en Amerique du Sud XVI-XIX Siècles: 51.