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Le Blon, Jacob [Jakob] Christoph [Christof]
(bapt Frankfurt am Main, 23 May 1667; d Paris, 15 May 1741). German printmaker, painter and tapestry manufacturer, active in the Netherlands, England and France. He was the son of the engraver and bookseller Christoph Le Blon II (1639–after 1706), whose mother was a daughter of Matthäus Merian (i), granddaughter of Johann Theodor de Bry and half-sister of Maria Sibylle Merian. Between 1696 and 1702 Le Blon was in Rome and was perhaps a pupil of Carlo Maratti. He then moved to Amsterdam in 1702, where he worked as a miniature painter until 1717. He visited London in 1710 and lived there from 1718 to 1734. He began experimenting with colour-printing in 1710, and in 1719 was granted a privilege by George I to reproduce pictures and drawings in full colour (see PRINTS, §III, 6). However, the company he set up failed in 1725. In that year he published Coloritto: Or the Harmony of Colouring in Painting, in which he presented his theory that any colour as well as black could be achieved by mixing in varying proportions just three colours (red, yellow and blue—not, as has been suggested, based on Newton’s colour theory). In 1727 he was granted a privilege to weave tapestries on the basis of his colour theory and set up a factory. Once again this failed, and, in 1734, he fled to Paris where Louis XV granted him a privilege in 1737 for colour-printing. His mezzotints, which were specifically designed to reproduce painting, were much admired by the French. As well as reproducing his own work (e.g. George I; see Singer, no. 37), Le Blon engraved after Barocci (e.g. Virgin and Child; see 1987 exh. cat.), Correggio and Hyacinthe Rigaud, as well as van Dyck. His full-colour reproductions were reproduced from three mezzotint plates, using red, yellow and blue ink (e.g. the colour separation plates for the portrait of Cardinal de Fleury after Rigaud are preserved in London, BM, 1929–24–3/4/5/6; see Lilien, figs 52–6)—one colour per plate; later he often added a black plate. His techniques had been forgotten by the mid-19th century, but his theory survived in chromolithography and is the basis of modern colour-printing (see LITHOGRAPHY, §§I and II).
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