Hubert-François Gravelot

Hubert-François Bourguignon, called Gravelot (26 March 1699 — 20 April 1773), was a French engraver, a famous book illustrator, ["He belongs to the group of "vignettistes" who are better known for their contribution to book illustration than for their paintings or independent drawings" Ruth S. Kraemer observed; (Kramer, "Drawings by Gravelot in the Morgan Library. A Checklist" "Master Drawings" 20.1 [Spring 1982: 3-21, 51-73] p. 3).] designer and drawing-master who 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.

Gravelot was born in Paris. He was a mediocre student, who did not profit from a premature stay in Rome, financed by his father, [He was not a winner of the Prix de Rome nor a pensioner of the French Academy in Rome.] from which he returned, his funds depleted, without a stay in Lyon, an artistic center that often provided a stimulating 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 of Jean II Restout, then of François Boucher.

His years in London, 1732-45 were fruitful ones. They coincided with the period 1713-44, when Britain and France were not at war. Though French-trained craftsmen, engravers and even some painters, [Watteau's visit to London was a personal one, to consult Dr. Mead, but several lesser painters were already making careers in Britain, notably Philip Mercier, an early practitioner of the "conversation piece", and Andien de Clermont.] were already working in London, but the Rococo style in luxury works of art was fresh and 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, [Peter K. Thornton, "Baroque and Rococo Silks" (London: Faber and Faber) 1965.] and the earliest identified full-blown Rococo piece of London silver, by the second-generation Huguenot Paul de Lamerie, can be dated about 1731 [Philip A.S. Phillips, "Paul de Lamerie: A study of His Life and Works" (London) 1935: pls. lxx, lxxiii and lxxix; noted by Michael Snodin, "English Rococo and its Continental origins", in "Rococo: Art and design in Hogarth's England" (Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984:27-33) p. 29.] . 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". [Snodin 1984:29.] 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." ["The Note-Books of George Vertue" vol. III, Walpole Society,22 (1934).]

George Vertue noted in 1741 that Gravelot "drawings for Engraving and all other kinds of Gold & Silver works [There are drawings for snuff-box lids at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Morgan Library; an engraving that includes a design for an "etui" was included in the 1984 Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition (] shews he is endowed with a great fruitfull genius for desseins inventions of history and ornaments" [Vertue, vol. III:105] By that time Gravelot became a central figure in the artistic set that gathered at Slaughter's Coffee House [Until he provoked a quarrel in 1739, remarked upon by Vertue.] in 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. [A point made by Alice Newlin, "The Celebrated Mr. Gravelot" "The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin", New Series, 5.2 (October 1946:61-66) p 61.] As a drawing-master Gravelot had Thomas Gainsborough for a pupil.

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 ["Gravelot's easy and elegant handling and composition, both of which can be described as rococo in character, were probably his chief contributions to English art." (Snodin 1984:30); a full section of the 1984 exhibition and its catalogue (D1-28) was devoted to "Gravelot and printmaking".] were worked up from dressed mannikins, fully-jointed down to their fingers, which he had made expressly in London. ["Éloge" 1774.]

Gravelot's rococo book illusatrations 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.

Anti-French sentiments in London after the Battle of Fontenoy 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 considerable fortune; [The figure reported by Whitley ("Artist and Their Friends in England, 1700-1799" [1928] I:94I) is £10,000. Whitley also describes how Gravelot was later able to arrange for Major's release from the Bastille, after the English had been rounded up in Paris and incarcerated.] there he soon found work suited to his talents, and settled down as a sought-after book illustrator: among his book illustrations, outstanding 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.

Gravelot's designs for the decorative arts were limited to a suite of engravings for wrought iron work, but his "rocailles", his cartouches 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). [Noted by Newlin 1946:66, note.] .

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