Jean-Baptiste Descamps

Jean-Baptiste Descamps (August 28, 1714 – June 30, 1791) was a French writer on art and artists, and painter of village scenes. He later founded an academy of art and his son later became a museum curator.

Descamps was born in Dunkirk, and trained by his father to become a Jesuit. He preferred to study art and became a pupil of Pierre Dulin, Nicolas Lancret and Nicolas de Largillierre at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris.

Accompanying Charles-André van Loo on a trip to England in 1740–1741 after his training, he formed an acquaintance with Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville, the friend of Voltaire. Le Cornier de Cideville, anxious for the honor of his native town of Rouen, persuaded the young artist to select it as the place of his future residence. Once settled in 1741, Descamps set up a studio and helped his new friend found a tuition-free art school in 1749, the Academy of Rouen. The school followed the basic ideas of the Philosophes of the Enlightenment. This school was to play a key role in the development of pictorial art in Normandy, and Descamps would direct this academy until he died. When Descamps wrote a memoir about this school for the French Academy, he was awarded a prize in 1767.

Besides his son Jean Baptiste Marc Antoine Descamps, his pupils were Michel Duplessis, Charles Eschard, François Godefroy, François Gonord, Etienne de Lavallée-Poussin, Charles Louis François Le Carpentier, Noël Le Mire, Jean Jacques Le Veau, Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier, and Jean Jacques Lequeu.

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