(b 1718; d Paris, 11 March 1780). Painter, draughtsman and engraver. He was a pupil of Charles Parrocel, and his work as a painter and illustrator demonstrates his early specialization in his master’s field of battle painting and related subjects. He made drawings to be engraved for the album Nouveau Recueil des troupes légères de France levées depuis la présente guerre, published in Paris by François Chéreau II in 1747, and in 1748 he won a second prize at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. His competition painting is untraced, but it has been suggested that the subject might have been the Defeat of Apollonius by Judas Maccabeus. His prize enabled him to enter the Ecole Royale des Elèves Protégés, and a number of his works were presented to Louis XV at Versailles. Among them were Paulus Aemilius Defeated by Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae (1751) and Mock Battle of Cavalry and Infantry against Dragoons (1753; both untraced). In 1751 he painted an equestrian portrait of the royal equerry Nestier (untraced; engraved by Jean Daullé), probably after a drawing by Parrocel. He was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in 1753 and exhibited several works at the Salon of that year, including Encounter of Spanish and German Cavalry and Encounter of Foreign Dragoons with French Infantry and Cavalry (both untraced). His provisional membership of the Académie permitted him to take up a commission from the Batîments du Roi to complete the series of paintings of the great battles of the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV intended to decorate the Grande Galerie of the château of Choisy-le-Roi; the series was begun by Parrocel but interrupted by his death. Due to mental illness, however, La Rue was confined in Notre-Dame-des-Vertus in 1756, and this prevented him from delivering any paintings except for the Battle of Lawfeld (Versailles, Château), begun by Parrocel. The series was subsequently discontinued. After the Salon of 1755, at which La Rue exhibited several drawings and three paintings of battles, his activity diminished and he appears to have stopped painting because of his illness. In the 1770s he either designed or engraved a number of vignettes and decorations for books, examples of which are to be found in Laurent Prault’s L’Esprit de Henri IV (Paris, 1770) and Charles Johnson’s L’Histoire des pirates anglais (Trévoux, 1775). Philibert-Benoît de La Rue’s drawings (of which there are examples in the Louvre, Paris, and elsewhere) are sometimes confused with those of another well-known battle painter, Francesco Casanova, as well as with those of his brother (2) Louis-Félix de La Rue.

Part of the La Rue, de family

• La Rue, Philibert-Benoît de
  • Parrocel: (3) Charles Parrocel