Jean-Baptiste Tavernier - Legacy

Legacy

Tavernier's travels, though often reprinted and translated, have a defect for his biographer: the chronology is much confused by his plan of combining notes from various journeys about certain routes for he sought mainly to furnish a guide to other merchants. A careful attempt to disentangle the thread of a life still in many parts obscure has been made by Charles Joret, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier d'aprés des Documents Nouveaux, 8vo, Paris, 1886, where the literature of the subject is fully given. See also an English translation of Tavernier's account of his travels so far as relating to India, by V Ball, 2 vols. (1889). He was first subject of an English film, The Diamond Queen (1953) by John Brahm Using Tavernier's Les Six Voyages as a template, gemologist/historian Richard W. Wise has written a historical novel, The French Blue, that dramatizes Tavernier's voyages up until the sale of The Great Blue Diamond to Louis XIV. The book's website includes a detailed timeline of Tavernier's life and voyages.

For the 400th anniversary of Tavernier's birth in 2005, the Swiss filmmaker Philippe Nicolet made a full-length film about him called Les voyages en Orient du Baron d'Aubonne. Another Swiss, the sculptor Jacques Basler, has made a life-sized bronze effigy of the great 17th-century traveller which looks out over Lake Geneva at the Hotel Baron Tavernier where there is also a permanent exhibition of all his drawings and archives in Chexbres.