|
Le Veau, Jean-Jacques(-André)
(b Rouen, 9 Jan 1729; d Paris, April 1786). French engraver. In his youth he was ill with scrofula, and it was during a stay in hospital, when he was 16 or 17, that a copy he made of a painting was brought to the attention of Jean-Baptiste Descamps, founder and director of the free school of drawing in Rouen, who gave him his earliest lessons in drawing. Descamps succeeded in placing him in the Paris studio of Jacques-Philippe Lebas, who signed two of Le Veau’s earliest engravings (Hédou 41, 43). Le Veau then collaborated with Noël Le Mire, himself a former pupil of Descamps in Rouen, who involved him in the production of the sumptuous edition by Pierre-François Basan and Le Mire of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1767–71); Le Veau contributed 16 pieces (H 189–204), including a fine engraving of Spring (H 189) after Charles Eisen and the Birth of Bacchus (H 195) and Vertumnus and Pomona (H 204), both after François Boucher. Le Veau engraved for other important luxury editions as well, such as that of La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles (1762), known as the edition of the ‘Fermiers généraux’ (H 154–60). Hédou considered Le Veau’s personal style to have developed c. 1770, and that The Guardroom after Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (1778; Paris, Bib. N., H 29) was his masterpiece. In 1775 Le Veau became an associate of the Académie de Rouen. Of his two children his daughter, Victoire-Geneviève-Louise (b 1766), also became an engraver.
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
