Claude-Henri Watelet

Claude-Henri Watelet (28 August 1718 – 12 January 1786) was a rich French fermier-général who was an amateur painter, a well-respected etcher, a writer on the arts and a connoisseur of gardens. Watelet's inherited privilege of farming taxes in the Orléanais left him free to pursue his avocations, art and literature and gardens. His Essai sur les jardins, 1774, firmly founded on English ideas expressed by Thomas Whately, introduced the English landscape garden to France, as the jardin Anglois. The sociable Watelet, who was born and died in Paris, was at the center of the French art world of his time.

Watelet was born in Paris, where he kept house in the rue Charlot and attended the Monday salons of Mme Geoffrin, where he would have seen La Live de Jully, who engraved one of Watelet's drawings and who, like Watelet, was an early patron of Greuze. Watelet was received as an honorary associate of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1754, at the same time as Bergeret de Grandcourt, another collector and connoisseur whose avocations were supported by the Ferme Générale.

In 1760 he was elected to the Académie française on the strength of his didactic poem L'Art de peindre. The poem is composed in four chants devoted in turn to Design, Colour, Picturesque Invention and Poetic Invention. It is followed by precepts in prose on Proportions, Ensemble, Balance or Weight and Movement of the figures, Beauty, Grace, Harmony of Light and Colours, Effects, and the Expression of the Passions. The second half of the work was decorated with his illustrative engravings and vignettes, for was a talented etcher: Denis Diderot said that if he had a copy of Watelet's poem L'Art de peindre he would cut out the illustrations and frame them under glass, and throw the rest in the fire.

An expanded version of the essays furnished the basis of Watelet's unfinished dictionary of the fine arts.

About this time Watelet embarked on a lifelong affair with the pastellist Marguerite Le Comte, a young married woman whom he had been teaching the technique of etching. With her and his old tutor the abbé Copette of the Sorbonne he made a second Italian tour, 1763–64. In Rome, two pensionnaires of the Académie française in Rome assembled a complimentary collection of poems by Luigi Subleyras, titled Nella venuta in Roma di madama le Comte e dei signori Watelet e Copette, which commemorates their visit in 1764; it is illustrated with etchings, mostly by Étienne de La Vallée Poussin, and Franz Edmund Weirotter and Hubert Robert, whose own suite of ten etchings Les Soirées de Rome, produced at the same time, was dedicated to Mme Le Conte.Winckelmann took them to view the antiquities at the Villa Albani

...
Wikipedia