Print showing the ascent of a Montgolfière balloon at Versailles, 19 September 1783

Landscape-oriented print showing the ascent of a Montgolfière balloon at Versailles on 19 September 1783. Hand-coloured etching on paper by an unidentified artist, published by Lenoir, Paris, 1783. The print shows a huge crowd of men, women, and children gathered in the courtyard outside the Palace of Versailles, whose buildings form the backdrop to the scene. In the middle of the throng stands a raised gantry from which the hot air balloon has just taken flight, a small cage trailing beneath it. Watercolour wash of several colours is used to pick out various features, notably the foremost members of the crowd, the gantry platform, the palace rooftops, the partially clouded sky, and the balloon itself. A paragraph of text printed below the image opens with a dedication to [Barthélemy] Faujas de Saint-Fond, before describing the event and technical information about the balloon, with publication details given underneath. All text in French.

This lively print shows a milestone moment: the world's first ever hot air balloon flight with living passengers. Carrying a sheep, a rooster, and a duck, the balloon was launched from the Palace of Versailles on 19 September 1783. The extraordinary event was witnessed by King Louis XVI, Queen Marie-Antoinette, and – according to this print’s inscription – a crowd of more than 130,000 people. Some spectators can even be seen on the palace rooftops.

Hot air balloons such as this became known as ‘Montgolfières’ after their inventors, the brothers Jacques-Etienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, who were paper manufacturers from southern France. They had performed their first demonstration only a few months earlier, launching a paper balloon from their hometown of Annonay on 4 June 1783.

The flight which followed at Versailles, overseen by Jacques-Etienne, was a masterstroke of propaganda. The backdrop of the palace firmly claimed the invention as French and associated it with the monarchy. To emphasise the point, the balloon itself was decorated with the French royal colours of blue and gold and with the king’s cipher of intertwined letter L’s – details which are clearly visible in this print.

The Versailles flight was both spectacle and experiment: the three animal passengers were suspended in a wicker cage to demonstrate the balloon’s safety. Airborne for about 8 minutes, they travelled some 3km northeast before eventually landing safely in the Bois de Vaucresson, Carrefour Maréchal. The flight’s success earned Jacques-Etienne financial support from the king. And just two months later, on 21 November 1783, the marquis François Laurent d’Arlandes and the physician Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier became the first humans to ever take to the skies in a free-flying balloon, which launched from Château de la Muette near Paris.

The Science Museum Group’s collections hold a rich variety of material from the ‘balloonomania’ craze inspired by such early ascents, which included balloon-themed textiles, jewellery, furniture, tableware, snuffboxes, fans, and prints. This particular print is dedicated to Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, a French geologist, volcanologist, and traveller who also keenly followed the Montgolfiers’ experiments and wrote about them. For an uncoloured copy of this print and another similar one also in the Science Museum Group’s collections, see object numbers 1937-648 and 1950-298/6.