Gilles Demarteau the Elder after Boucher: La Jardinière

This work is the pendant of "La fermière" after Huet. This is the portrait of Madame Favart in the role of Ninette, character of the comedy in two acts "Caprice in love" or "Ninette at the Court". Other representations of this character appear on the vignette produced by Le Bas. (P. Jean-Richard, General inventory of engravings from the French School 'The engraved work of François Boucher in the Edmond de Rothschild Collection', Paris 1978, p. 218 and 220, n°835).

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.

Pierrette Jean-Richard, General inventory of engravings from the French School 'The engraved work of François Boucher in the Edmond de Rothschild Collection', Paris 1978;

Malcolm Salaman, French colour-prints of the XVIII century, 1913, pp.60-62; Margaret Crasselli, Colorful Impressions/The Printmaking Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France, 2008;

Campbell Dodgson, Old French Colour-Prints, 1924.