Hubert-François Gravelot
Encyclopedia
Hubert-François Bourguignon, commonly known as Gravelot (26 March 1699 — 20 April 1773), was a French engraver, a famous book illustrator, designer and drawing-master. Born in Paris
, he emigrated to London
in 1732, where he quickly became a central figure in the introduction of the Rococo
style in British design, which was disseminated from London in this period, through the media of book illustrations and engraved designs as well as by the examples of luxury goods in the "French taste" brought down from London to provincial towns and country houses.
, an artistic center that often provided a stop-over for art students between Paris and Rome. Unsuccessful in a commercial venture at Saint Domingue on his father's account, he returned to Paris and became the pupil first of Jean II Restout
, and then of François Boucher
.
Paul de Lamerie
, can be dated about 1731. Gravelot's trip was not a speculation; he had been invited by Claude du Bosc
to engrave designs for an English translation of Bernard Picart
's Ceremonies and Religious Customs of... the Known World. The chronicler of English art and artists George Vertue
, an engraver himself, soon took note of Gravelot: "His Manner of designing neat and correct much like Picart" he noted in 1733. "A very curious pen & writes neatly. He has been lately in Glocestershire where he was imployed to drawn Antient Monuments in Churches & other Antiquities... He has tryd at painting a small piece or two."
George Vertue noted in 1741 that Gravelot's "drawings for Engraving and all other kinds of Gold & Silver works shews he is endowed with a great fruitfull genius for desseins inventions of history and ornaments"
By that time Gravelot had become a central figure in the artistic set that gathered at Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane
and formed the St. Martin's Lane Academy
organised by William Hogarth
in the premises of his father-in-law Sir James Thornhill
. The St. Martin's Lane Academy was an unofficial precursor of the Royal Academy
at a time when there were no public exhibitions of art in London, no annual salons as in Paris, no public museums and no places to see or copy from good examples of paintings save in the houses of the rich or noble. As a drawing-master Gravelot had Thomas Gainsborough
for a pupil.
in 1745 forced Gravelot's return to Paris that October, accompanied by his student Thomas Major, later the first engraver voted an Associate of the Royal Academy, and with a fortune of 10,000 pounds sterling; there he soon settled down as a book illustrator: among his book illustrations, projects were Tom Jones (Paris and London, 1750), Manon Lescaut
(1753, illustration, left) a Décaméron (1757), La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), the Contes moraux of Marmontel (1765), a French translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1767–71), and of Torquato Tasso
's Gerusalemme Liberata (1771). He died in Paris.
artists. Gravelot revitalized illustrative engraving in England
, and after his return to Paris, a group of accomplished engravers continued to work in his manner. The descriptive precision and elegance of his line and the variety of his inventions can be seen in the drawings for two of his more important commissions, the second volume of Gay’s Fables and the second edition of L. Theobald's The Works of Shakespeare in Eight Volumes, and in his illustrations for the first French translation of Boccaccio Le Decameron, 1757. The books are listed by Gordon Ray as one of the most outstanding illustrated books of all time.
Gravelot's designs for the decorative arts were limited to a suite of engravings for wrought iron work, but his rocailles, his cartouche
s for maps, his rococo borders provided inspiration for goldsmiths and silversmiths, cabinet-makers like Thomas Chippendale
, tapestry cartoons made at the Soho works, and china painters at the Chelsea porcelain manufactory.
Gravelot's older brother was the geographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, whose "Éloge de M. Gravelot" appeared in La Nécrologie des hommes celebres de France (Paris 1774).
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, he emigrated to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in 1732, where he quickly became a central figure in the introduction of the Rococo
Rococo
Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...
style in British design, which was disseminated from London in this period, through the media of book illustrations and engraved designs as well as by the examples of luxury goods in the "French taste" brought down from London to provincial towns and country houses.
Education
Gravelot was a mediocre student, who did not profit from a premature stay in Rome, financed by his father, from which he returned, his funds depleted, without a stay in LyonLyon
Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....
, an artistic center that often provided a stop-over for art students between Paris and Rome. Unsuccessful in a commercial venture at Saint Domingue on his father's account, he returned to Paris and became the pupil first of Jean II Restout
Jean II Restout
Jean II Restout was a French painter, whose late baroque classicism rendered his altarpieces, such as the Death of Saint Scholastica an "isolated achievement" that ran counter to his rococo contemporaries.-Biography:...
, and then of François Boucher
François Boucher
François Boucher was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture...
.
Early career
His years in London, 1732-45 were fruitful ones. They coincided with a period when Britain and France were not at war. Though French-trained craftsmen, engravers and even some painters, were already working in London, but the Rococo style in luxury works of art was relatively new: the Spitalfields silk industry, always dominated by Parisian innovations rendered by Huguenot designers and weavers, produced its earliest asymmetrical and naturalistic floral designs in the early 1730s, and the earliest identified full-blown Rococo piece of London silver, by the second-generation HuguenotHuguenot
The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the 17th century, people who formerly would have been called Huguenots have instead simply been called French Protestants, a title suggested by their German co-religionists, the...
Paul de Lamerie
Paul de Lamerie
Paul de Lamerie was an English silversmith. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes him as the "greatest silversmith working in England in the 18th century". Though his mark raises the market value of silver, his output was large and not all his pieces are outstanding...
, can be dated about 1731. Gravelot's trip was not a speculation; he had been invited by Claude du Bosc
Claude Du Bosc
Claude Du Bosc , was an engraver.Du Bosc was born in France in 1682. In 1712 he came to England with Claude Dupuis to assist Nicholas Dorigny in engraving the cartoons of Raphael at Hampton Court, where he resided for some time, until the engravings were nearly completed...
to engrave designs for an English translation of Bernard Picart
Bernard Picart
Bernard Picart , was a French engraver, son of Etienne Picart, also an engraver. He was born in Paris and died in Amsterdam. He moved to Antwerp in 1696, and then spent a year in Amsterdam before returning to France at the end of 1698...
's Ceremonies and Religious Customs of... the Known World. The chronicler of English art and artists George Vertue
George Vertue
George Vertue was an English engraver and antiquary, whose notebooks on British art of the first half of the 18th century are a valuable source for the period.-Life:...
, an engraver himself, soon took note of Gravelot: "His Manner of designing neat and correct much like Picart" he noted in 1733. "A very curious pen & writes neatly. He has been lately in Glocestershire where he was imployed to drawn Antient Monuments in Churches & other Antiquities... He has tryd at painting a small piece or two."
George Vertue noted in 1741 that Gravelot's "drawings for Engraving and all other kinds of Gold & Silver works shews he is endowed with a great fruitfull genius for desseins inventions of history and ornaments"
By that time Gravelot had become a central figure in the artistic set that gathered at Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane
St. Martin's Lane
St. Martin's Lane is a street on the edge of Covent Garden in Central London, which runs from the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, after which it is named, near Trafalgar Square northwards to Long Acre.A narrow street with relatively little traffic, St...
and formed the St. Martin's Lane Academy
St. Martin's Lane Academy
The St. Martin's Lane Academy, which was the precursor of the Royal Academy, was organized in 1735 by William Hogarth, from the circle of artists and designers who gathered at Slaughter's Coffee House at the upper end of St. Martin's Lane, London. The artistic set that introduced the Rococo style...
organised by William Hogarth
William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
in the premises of his father-in-law Sir James Thornhill
James Thornhill
Sir James Thornhill was an English painter of historical subjects, in the Italian baroque tradition.-Life:...
. The St. Martin's Lane Academy was an unofficial precursor of the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
at a time when there were no public exhibitions of art in London, no annual salons as in Paris, no public museums and no places to see or copy from good examples of paintings save in the houses of the rich or noble. As a drawing-master Gravelot had Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter.-Suffolk:Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk. He was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver and maker of woolen goods. At the age of thirteen he impressed his father with his penciling skills so that he let...
for a pupil.
Personal adult life
Gravelot himself was an inveterate, even obsessive reader; his brother's Éloge reports that he would take a small volume to bed with him, in case of insomnia. His easy and elegant book illustrations were worked up from dressed mannikins, fully jointed down to their fingers, which he had made expressly in London.Late career
Gravelot's rococo book illustrations in London reached a peak in the designs he contributed to Theobald's edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare, 1740, for which Gravelot provided thirty-five frontispieces.Escape back to France
Anti-French sentiments in London after the Battle of FontenoyBattle of Fontenoy
The Battle of Fontenoy, 11 May 1745, was a major engagement of the War of the Austrian Succession, fought between the forces of the Pragmatic Allies – comprising mainly Dutch, British, and Hanoverian troops under the nominal command of the Duke of Cumberland – and a French army under Maurice de...
in 1745 forced Gravelot's return to Paris that October, accompanied by his student Thomas Major, later the first engraver voted an Associate of the Royal Academy, and with a fortune of 10,000 pounds sterling; there he soon settled down as a book illustrator: among his book illustrations, projects were Tom Jones (Paris and London, 1750), Manon Lescaut
Manon Lescaut
Manon Lescaut is a short novel by French author Abbé Prévost. Published in 1731, it is the seventh and final volume of Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité . It was controversial in its time and was banned in France upon publication...
(1753, illustration, left) a Décaméron (1757), La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), the Contes moraux of Marmontel (1765), a French translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1767–71), and of Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...
's Gerusalemme Liberata (1771). He died in Paris.
His work
His illustrations of contemporary manners and costumes are known to have influenced EnglishEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
artists. Gravelot revitalized illustrative engraving in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, and after his return to Paris, a group of accomplished engravers continued to work in his manner. The descriptive precision and elegance of his line and the variety of his inventions can be seen in the drawings for two of his more important commissions, the second volume of Gay’s Fables and the second edition of L. Theobald's The Works of Shakespeare in Eight Volumes, and in his illustrations for the first French translation of Boccaccio Le Decameron, 1757. The books are listed by Gordon Ray as one of the most outstanding illustrated books of all time.
Gravelot's designs for the decorative arts were limited to a suite of engravings for wrought iron work, but his rocailles, his cartouche
Cartouche
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an ellipse with a horizontal line at one end, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name, coming into use during the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under Pharaoh Sneferu, replacing the earlier serekh...
s for maps, his rococo borders provided inspiration for goldsmiths and silversmiths, cabinet-makers like Thomas Chippendale
Thomas Chippendale
Thomas Chippendale was a London cabinet-maker and furniture designer in the mid-Georgian, English Rococo, and Neoclassical styles. In 1754 he published a book of his designs, titled The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director...
, tapestry cartoons made at the Soho works, and china painters at the Chelsea porcelain manufactory.
Gravelot's older brother was the geographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, whose "Éloge de M. Gravelot" appeared in La Nécrologie des hommes celebres de France (Paris 1774).
Sources
- Gowing, L (ed.) 1995, A Biographical Dictionary of Artists, Rev. edn, Andromeda Oxford Limited, Oxfordshire.