Gilles Demarteau the Elder after Huet: Scene pastorale

This impression carries the number 503 – probably a printing error. The correct number should be No.523. We managed to trace a few impressions with the same number of 503 on the market (see Geneve Encheres, Sale 20/09/2017, Lot 348).

Demarteau is credited with the invention of the so-called 'crayon-manner' engraving. Though Jean-Charles François (1717-1769) was officially recognized as the first to use this method in 1757, Demarteau perfected it further and used it with real artistic feeling and a style of his own. After his first collaboration with François in 1756 till his death, Demarteau published hundreds of chalk-manner prints. A large portion of those were after the drawings by Boucher and Huet.

Almost all of Demarteau’s prints bear numbers that were inscribed into the copperplate at the time of publication. These numbers record the approximate order in which the prints were made and later served as the basis for a catalogue compiled in 1788 by the artist’s nephew and collaborator, Gilles-Antoine.

Leopold de Leymarie, L'oeuvre de Gilles Demarteau l'ainé graveur du Roi, Paris, 1896;

Malcolm Salaman, French colour-prints of the XVIII century, 1913;

Campbell Dodgson, Old French Colour-Prints, 1924;

Margaret Crasselli, Colorful Impressions/The Printmaking Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France, 2008.