Abstract
This essay examines the revealing particularities of the act of seeing in a historical setting. Placing stress on the classical unities, it presents a visual and documentary reconstruction of two indirectly related scenarios in which the act of seeing was staged to radically different effect. In pursuing the deceptively obvious argument that the how of looking at things depends largely on the where of looking at them, it offers a study in and by juxtaposition. The setting is eighteenth-century Le Havre-de-Grâce. The storied visit of Madame de Pompadour to see the sea for the first time provides the pretext for placing the Abbé Jacques-François Dicquemare (b. Le Havre 1733), who devoted his life to the study of the sea, on the historical stage. He has an instructive role to play as a minor but important character in the development of natural history, nominally understood as the art of describing the world.
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