HUBER, Jean

Painter, silhouettist, draughtsman and printmaker, member of a Swiss family of artists. His paternal ancestors were patricianGLOSSARYoriginally a member of the ancient Roman nobility; from the Middle Ages onwards a term for a noble, wealthy citizen. Genevese merchant bankers. As a young man he soldiered at Kassel in Germany and in Italy, where he fought for Savoy in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48). In 1752 he was elected to Geneva's Council of Two Hundred and served his native city as a magistrate. He had no formal artistic training, but from his youth he clipped out of paper or cards freehand profiles of a kind that later came to be called silhouettes. He also devised what he called tableaux en découpures, cut in vellum or parchmentGLOSSARYWriting material made from the skins of sheep or calf, less frequently pig, goat,, and other animals; it has also been used for painting, and occasionally for printing and bookbinding. Pliny says that it ewas invented in the 2nd century BC in Pergamum; hence the name parchment from the Latin pergamena (of Pergamum). Skin had been used as a writng material before this, but the refined methods of cleaning and stretching involved in making parchment enabled booth sides of a leaf to be used, leading eventually to the supplanting of the manuscript roll by the bound book. Vellum is a fine kind of parchment made from delicate skins of young (sometimes stillborn) animals. Paper began to replace parchment from about the 14th century, but parchment is still used for certain kinds of documents, and the name is often applied to high-quality writng paper. on the scale of large reproductive prints; these represented antiqueGLOSSARYthe classical age of Greece and Rome began with the Greek migrations of the 2nd millennium BC, and ended in the West in 476 AD with the deposition of the Roman emperor Romulus Augustulus (c. 475 AD); in the East it ended in 529 AD when the Platonic Academy was closed by Justinian (482 - 565 AD). subjects, landscapes and genreGLOSSARYIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature. scenes. He is best known for his witty paintings, cut-out profiles, prints and drawings of the writer and thinker Voltaire.