Biography
French painter, engraver, ornamentalist. He studied in Paris with Guillaume Dheulland and Pierre-Edme Babel. He was an illustrator and ornamentalist for a number of classics (La Fontaine, Racine, Bussy-Rabutin), contemporaries (Imbert, Rousseau, Delille), as well as numerous scientific works, including “Traité des horloges marines” (“Description of Marine Clocks”). Under the direction of Pierre-François Basan and Noël Le Mire, he contributed to the 4-volume edition of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, published by Jean-Baptiste Despilly and Noël-Jacques Pissot, illustrated by the best engravers of the time. He mainly created elegant and inventive vignettes for the title pages. He also took part in a major Franco-Chinese project called “Les Conquêtes de l’empereur de la Chine”, commissioned by the Jesuits Jean-Denis Attiret, Giuseppe Castiglione, Ignace Sichelbart, and Jean Damascene, a series of 16 large engravings coordinated by Charles Nicolas Cochin, executed in Paris between 1766-74 on behalf of the Qianlong sovereign.
