de Rabié, Réné-Gabriel

René-Gabriel de Rabié was born in 1717 in Rochefort, France. Rochefort was established by Louis XIV as an arsenal and shipyard for the French Navy, and the young de Rabié trained to be a naval engineer (ingénieur). In 1742, he sailed for Saint Domingue (now Haiti), the richest of the French Caribbean colonies. In the 1770s, de Rabié became the chief engineer for the north part of Saint Domingue and designed many of the public monuments and buildings in Le Cap Français (now Cap Haitien), the chief port. He was also an accomplished cartographer and his manuscript maps are held in the Archives Nationales d’outre-mer and the Bibliothèque nationale in France and in the British Library.

In 1767, de Rabié began to paint watercolours of the plants and animals of Saint-Domingue. Aided by his eldest daughter, Jaquette Marie Anne (born 1750), his grandson Armand Gabriel Paparel de la Boissière, and his enslaved servants, he completed 266 watercolours of birds, plants, insects, shells, fish and crustaceans found chiefly in the gardens and forests and in the sea around Le Cap before his return to France in 1784. He died in Paris in early 1785

Created for the Hidden Hands project (https://web.archive.org/web/20250731122336/https://hiddenhands.ca/), January 2026.