Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune
Encyclopedia
Moreau le Jeune, as he is usually called, was born in Paris
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 was the pupil of the painter Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain who accompanied his master to St Petersburg in 1758 when Le Lorrain went to be the first director of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts
Imperial Academy of Arts
The Russian Academy of Arts, informally known as the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, completed 25 years later in 1789...
established the previous year, where Moreau briefly taught drawing before returning to Paris in 1759, after Le Lorrain's unexpected death.
He worked for the engraver Jacques-Philippe Lebas, producing reproductive drawings of contemporary paintings and those of Old Masters for engravers to work from and learning etching
Etching
Etching is the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal...
During the 1760s he also provided drawings to be engraved for the Recueil d’antiquités of the comte de Caylus, who kept a benevolent watch over him. For Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
and Alembert’s Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert...
he provided pen and wash drawings for the engravers, illustrating artisanal processes. As an engraver he collaborated with 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...
, Hubert Gravelot and others on illustrations for an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses (poem)
Metamorphoses is a Latin narrative poem in fifteen books by the Roman poet Ovid describing the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework. Completed in AD 8, it is recognized as a masterpiece of Golden Age Latin literature...
.
In 1765 he married Françoise-Nicole Pineau, daughter of François Pineau, master sculptor, and Jeanne-Marie Prault - whose father was Pierre Prault, patriarch of a family of publishers, privilègiés du Roi.
In 1770 he succeeded Charles-Nicolas Cochin
Charles-Nicolas Cochin
Charles-Nicolas Cochin was a French engraver, designer, writer, and art critic. To distinguish him from his father of the same name, he is variously called Charles-Nicolas Cochin le Jeune , Charles-Nicolas Cochin le fils , or Charles-Nicolas Cochin II.-Early life:Cochin was born in Paris, the son of...
as chief Dessinateur des Menus Plaisirs du Roi, on Cochin's recommendation, which occasioned his prints celebrating the marriage of the Dauphin and his coronation as Louis XVI
Louis XVI of France
Louis XVI was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre until 1791, and then as King of the French from 1791 to 1792, before being executed in 1793....
; in 1781, in part on the strength of these productions he was appointed Dessinateur et Graveur du Cabinet du Roi, which brought an annual pension and lodgings in the galleries of the Palais du Louvre
Palais du Louvre
The Louvre Palace , on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris, is a former royal palace situated between the Tuileries Gardens and the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois...
. Now he found that he required the services of other engravers to reproduce his own designs, which included illustrations for the Chansons of Jean Benjamin de Laborde (1773), the collected works of Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
(1773–82) and of Voltaire
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
(printed at Brussels, 1782–9). For the Menus Plaisirs, the office that produced and executed all the designs for settings of court festivities and recorded them in presentation drawings, he recorded many occasions such as his famous pen-and-wash record of the inauguration in September 1771 of Mme du Barry's Pavillon de Louveciennes
Château de Louveciennes
The Château de Louveciennes in Louveciennes, in the Yvelines department of France, is composed of the château itself, constructed at the end of the 17th century. It was then expanded and redecorated by Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Madame du Barry in the 18th century, and the music pavilion was...
(illustration, right). He still found time for intimate portrait drawings in charcoal and chalks
Moreau's name appears in the 1778 roster of Les Neuf Soeurs, the masonic lodge named for the Muses that had been founded two years previously by the astronomer Jérôme Lalande
Jérôme Lalande
Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande was a French astronomer and writer.-Biography:Lalande was born at Bourg-en-Bresse...
, and which served as a forum for progressive ideas.
He traveled to Italy for six months in 1785 and wasagrée at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1780 and received there as a full member in 1789. The French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, with which Moreau was in sympathy, did not hinder his success as an illustrator, providing engravers with pen and wash drawings to replicate, as for a French translation of the Aeneid
Aeneid
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...
published in 1804 In 1793 Moreau was appointed to the commission temporaire des arts and in 1797 was made a professor at the newly-reformed écoles centrales. With the Bourbon restoration in 1814 Louis XVIII
Louis XVIII of France
Louis XVIII , known as "the Unavoidable", was King of France and of Navarre from 1814 to 1824, omitting the Hundred Days in 1815...
appointed him once again to a royal office. He died in Paris.
In his prolific career his best-known works are those twenty-four illustrations that record fashionable dress and interiors of the last years of the Ancien Régime, his contributions to the Monument du costume physique et morale, twelve as a Suite d'estampes pour servir à l'histoire dews mœurs des François au dix-huitième siècle, 1776 and 1777, and twelve more in the Troisième Suite d'éstampes pour servir a l'Histoire des Moeurs et du Costume..., 1783, published by his uncle by marriage, L.-F. Prault, and many times re-issued in varying formats, notably in a collection in 1789 with text by Restif de la Bretonne. Each of the first dozen of these vignettes of stylish contemporary life has an element of anecdote, reporting in a cohesive and unified manner "a highly idealized vision of an aristocratic family's approach to childbearing and motherhood based on the philosophy of Rousseau" (Heller-Greenman). In the second suite, a hint of criticism of aristocratic duplicity in affairs of the heart can be discerned and some rural vignettes vertueuses (sentimental and virtuous) provide a contrasting social world in the manner of Greuze.
Moreau le Jeune was resuscitated from oblivion in the later nineteenth century by the connoisseurs of the dix-huitième Edmond
Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond de Goncourt , born Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt, was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt.-Biography:...
and Jules de Goncourt
Jules de Goncourt
Jules de Goncourt , born Jules Alfred Huot de Goncourt, was a French writer, who published books together with his brother Edmond.- Works :With Edmond de Goncourt:* Sœur Philomène...
.
Further reading
- Adrien Moureau. Les Moreaus (Librairie de L'Art, 1893).
- Marie-Joseph-François Mahérault, 1979. L'Oeuvre gravé de Jean-Michel Moreau (1741-1814): Catalogue raisonnée... (Amsterdam)