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French, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 17 May 1754, in Lyons; died 24 October 1843, in Lyons.

Painter (gouache), watercolourist, pastellist, engraver, draughtsman, miniaturist. Portraits, still-lifes (flowers/fruit), costume studies. Designs for fabrics.

Berjon was the son of a butcher and grew up in the Vaise suburb of Lyons. He initially worked with his father; then, it is thought, he gave this up to study medicine, before learning to draw with the sculptor Perrache in Lyons. Eventually he became a designer at a silk manufacturer in Lyons, and began to paint. He often travelled to Paris on business, where he got to know several painters and became friends with the portrait artist Augustin. As a result of the destruction of the silk factory during the siege of Lyons, Berjon moved to Paris, where he lived in abject poverty for many years. He eventually returned to Lyons and went to work for an embroidery manufacturer and, in ...

(b Paris, Sept 29, 1703; d Paris, May 30, 1770).

French painter, draughtsman and etcher. Arguably it was he, more than any other artist, who set his stamp on both the fine arts and the decorative arts of the 18th century. Facilitated by the extraordinary proliferation of engravings, Boucher successfully fed the demand for imitable imagery at a time when most of Europe sought to follow what was done at the French court and in Paris. He did so both as a prolific painter and draughtsman (he claimed to have produced some 10,000 drawings during his career) and through engravings after his works, the commercial potential of which he seems to have been one of the first artists to exploit. He reinvented the genre of the pastoral, creating an imagery of shepherds and shepherdesses as sentimental lovers that was taken up in every medium, from porcelain to toile de Jouy, and that still survives in a debased form. At the same time, his manner of painting introduced the virtuosity and freedom of the sketch into the finished work, promoting painterliness as an end in itself. This approach dominated French painting until the emergence of Neo-classicism, when criticism was heaped on Boucher and his followers. His work never wholly escaped this condemnation, even after the taste for French 18th-century art started to revive in the second half of the 19th century. In his own day, the fact that he worked for both collectors and the market, while retaining the prestige of a history painter, had been both Boucher’s strength and a cause of his decline....

French, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 1749, in Versailles; died 1825, in Paris.

Painter (including gouache), watercolourist, sculptor, draughtsman (wash), engraver, decorative artist. Mythological subjects, allegorical subjects, historical portraits, hunting scenes, interiors with figures, gardens. Stage costumes and sets, furniture, designs for fabrics, frontispieces.

Dugourc's father, who was in the service of the Duke of Orléans, had a considerable fortune. Dugourc was permitted to attend the lessons taken by the Duke of Chartres (the future Philippe-Égalité), and at the age 15 left for Rome, attached to the embassy of the Count of Cani. From his infancy, he had shown an aptitude for drawing, perspective and architecture. However, the death of his mother, followed shortly after by the loss of his father's fortune, changed his life. From being an amateur, Dugourc became a professional artist, and executed paintings, sculptures and engravings. In a work published in ...

(b Rouen, 1735; d Paris, 1802).

French painter, printmaker and designer. He came from a family of architects and engravers that had been active in Rouen since the 16th century, and he may have been distantly related to Jean de La Vallée. He first studied under Jean-Baptiste Descamps at the newly established Académie des Arts du Dessin in Rouen and in 1755 went to Paris and entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre. In 1759 he won the Prix de Rome with Elisha Multiplying the Poor Widow’s Oil (untraced), and from 1759 he was at the Ecole des Elèves Protégés in Paris. Already by this time he seems to have been producing landscapes in the manner of Nicolas Poussin and had begun to be referred to by the name Lavallée-Poussin. He was in Rome from 1761 to 1777, for part of the time at the Académie de France. He then stayed with Louis-Auguste Le Tonnelier, Baron de Breteuil, the Maltese Ambassador, whose house, the Garden of Malta, Lavallée decorated in ...

[Christof]

(bapt Frankfurt am Main, May 23, 1667; d Paris, May 15, 1741).

German printmaker, painter and tapestry manufacturer, active in the Netherlands, England and France. He was the son of the engraver and bookseller Christoph Le Blon II (1639–after 1706), whose mother was a daughter of Matthäus Merian (i), granddaughter of Johann Theodor de Bry and half-sister of Maria Sibylle Merian. Between 1696 and 1702 Le Blon was in Rome and was perhaps a pupil of Carlo Maratti. He then moved to Amsterdam in 1702, where he worked as a miniature painter until 1717. He visited London in 1710 and lived there from 1718 to 1734. He began experimenting with colour-printing in 1710, and in 1719 was granted a privilege by George I to reproduce pictures and drawings in full colour (see Prints, §III, 6). However, the company he set up failed in 1725. In that year he published Coloritto: Or the Harmony of Colouring in Painting, in which he presented his theory that any colour as well as black could be achieved by mixing in varying proportions just three colours (red, yellow and blue—not, as has been suggested, based on Newton’s colour theory). In ...

French, 18th century, male.

Born 17 January 1721, in Paris; died 6 March 1786, in Paris.

Painter, watercolourist, draughtsman, engraver (etching), decorative designer. Genre scenes, interiors with figures, flowers. Designs (embroidery).

Charles de Saint-Aubin was firstly the pupil of his father, the embroiderer Gabriel-Germain de Saint-Aubin. He then worked in Dutro's studio, where he studied ornamental decoration. He worked with his father until ...