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Norblin de la Gourdaine, Jan Piotr [Jean-Pierre]
(b Misy-fault-Yonne, 15 July 1745; d Paris, 23 Feb 1830). French draughtsman, printmaker and painter, active mainly in Poland. He was initially a self-taught artist and, in his first drawings and etchings, showed the influence of Antoine Watteau. In about 1769 he studied with the battle-painter Francesco Casanova, in 1769–70 at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and in 1770–71 under Louis-Michel van Loo and Joseph-Marie Vien at the Ecole Royale des Elèves Protégés, all in Paris. From 1771 to 1774 he worked independently in his native town and in Paris, London and Spa, again making drawings in the style of Watteau and also working from nature (e.g. The Colonel, 1774; Warsaw, N. Mus.; see fig.). At this time he met Prince Adam Casimir Czartoryski, to whom he dedicated the engraving Alexander the Great in the Workshop of Apelles (1774), emphasizing his own status through the subject. In 1774 he travelled with the Prince to Warsaw, where he first worked at the Romantic garden of the Powazki estate near the city, planned at this time by Princess Isabella Czartoryska and embodying the ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Norblin took part in the planning and decoration of the garden, painted decorative panels in the spirit of the fêtes champêtres of Watteau (e.g. Group on a Picnic beside a Lake, 1777; Warsaw, N. Mus.) and signs for individual cottages, and produced paper wall-coverings painted with scenes of rural games. At this time he also decorated other buildings, providing, for example, the ceiling-painting Morning Star (or Aurora Leading Apollo’s Horses) of 1783 for the Temple of Diana in Princess Helena Radziwill’s landscape park ARKADIA, near Lowicz. He painted numerous scenes in the style of Watteau for King Stanislav II Poniatowski.
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