MOREAU, Jean-Michel

Draughtsman, engraver and painter, part of a French family of artists. The brothers Louis-Gabriel (1740-1805) and Jean-Michel Moreau (1741-1814) were the sons of a Paris wigmaker. They both worked in the same media but achieved success in different fields, Louis-Gabriel working principally as an innovative landscape painter and Jean-Michel as a book illustrator and a recorder of contemporary manners and events. Horace Vernet was Jean-Michel's grandson, from the marriage of his daughter to Carle Vernet.

Jean-Michel Moreau (Moreau le Jeune; Moreau the Younger) was the pupil of the painter and engraver Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain, with whom he went to St Petersburg in 1758 on Le Lorrain's appointment as first director of the Academy of Fine Arts. Moreau was appointed a professor of drawing at the Academy. He executed a number of works in Russia, including a red-chalk portraitGLOSSARYThe Roman portrait bust survived in the form of life-sized reliquaries of saints, but it was in 15th century Florence that the individual features and character of a contemporary sitter were accurately recorded by sculptors such as Donatello, Desiderio da Settignano, Mino da Fiesole and the Rossellino. A similar degree of realism occurs in 15th century tomb sculpture. The equestrian portrait, based on antique statues such as the Marcus Aurelius monument (Rome, Campidoglio), was revived in the 14th century. Two examples in fresco are Simone Martini's Guidoriccio (c. 1328; Siena, Palazzo Pubblico) and the posthumous portrait of Sir John Hawkwood (1436; Florence, Cathedral) by Uccello, which gives the illusion of a 3-dimensional statue seen from below. The Venetian Republic ordered imposing monuments from Donatello (1447; Gattarnelata, Padua) and Verrocchio (14799; Colleoni, Venice), whilst other statesmen ordered their own images to be erected in public places, directly relating themselves to the military heroes of ancient Rome. Another form of political portraiture derived from antiquity was the commemorative portrait medal designed by artists such as Pisanello. The carved or painted profile portrait became popular in the 1450s. The realism of the clear, flattened image, painted under the influence of Flemish examples by the Pollaiuolo brothers, Piero della Francesca and Botticelli, was superseded by the three-quarter and frontal portrait, psychologically more complex, such as Leonardo's enigmatic Mona Lisa (Paris, Louvre) with her momentary smile or Andrea del Sarto's arresting Portrait of a Man (London, National Gallery). The 16th century portrait became generalized, Lotto's Andrea Odoni (1527; Royal Collection) being an idealized concept of a collector rather than an individual. Group portraits, decorating whole rooms, include the narrative scenes of the Gonzaga court painted by Mantegna (completed 1474; Mantua, Palazzo Ducale) and the elaborate schemes commissioned by the Farnese family in Rome from Vasari (1546; Palazzo della Cancelleria) and Salviati (after 1553; Palazzo Farnese). Portraits were also incorporated into religious narratives, as in Ghirlandaio's fresco cycle painted for Giovanni Tornabuoni in S. Maria Novella, Florence (1486-90). of the Empress Elizabeth (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).

In 1759 he returned to Paris and, virtually abandoning painting, entered the workshop of the engraver Jacques-Philippe Lebas, producing drawings for engravers to work from after such contemporary artists as François Boucher and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, as well as after Rembrandt and other Old Masters. During the 1760s he also provided drawings to be engraved for Caylus's Recueil d'antiquités and for Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and collaborated as an engraver with Boucher, François Eisen, Hubert-François Gravelot and Charles Monnet on the illustrations for an edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. By 1770, the year in which he succeeded Charles-Nicolas Cochin II as Dessinateur des Menus Plaisirs du Roi, his career was sufficiently well established for him to employ other engravers including Noël Le Mire, Nicolas and Robert De Launay and Elise Saugrain to reproduce his own designs.

Popular and successful, he illustrated a large number of literary works including the Chansons of Laborde (1773), the collected works of Rousseau (1773-82) and the collected works of Voltaire (1782-89). In his role as draughtsman to the Menus Plaisirs, and from 1781 as Dessinateur et Graveur du CabinetGLOSSARYA small, private room where works of art, valuables and curiosities were kept and contemplated at leisure; over time the term was used for the collections themselves. Renaissance cabinets played an important role in the development of museums and art galleries. du Roi, he recorded many court festivities in drawings of great finesse, such as the pen and wash IlluminationGLOSSARYThe decoration of manuscripts, one of the most common forms of medieval art; because of its monastic origins, usually of religious texts. The practice extends from heavy decorations of initial letters and inter-woven margin patterns (as in Celtic examples) to miniatures and and full-page illuminations, often of a formal and grandiose kind (as in Byzantine manuscripts). Rich colors are a common feature, in particular a luxirious use of gold and silver. Illuminations survived the advent of printing for some time and only died out with the rise of printed illustration in the 16 century. of the Park at Versailles on the Occasion of the Marriage of the Dauphin (1770; Paris, Louvre), which amply demonstrates his mastery of composition, detail and handling of light. His best-known works, which provide an incomparable record of the fashionable dress and manners of the last years of the ancien régime, are the many illustrations that he contributed to the second and third series of the famous Monument du costume physique et morale (1777, 1783), published by his uncle by marriage, Laurent-François Prault.