Jean-Gabriel Charvet

Jean-Gabriel Charvet (1750–1829), also known as Jean Gabriel Charvet, was a French painter, designer and draftsman who was born in Serrières, Ardèche, France. He studied at the École de Dessin in Lyon under the French artist Donat Nonotte (1708–1785) and worked as a designer for the French wallpaper manufacturer Joseph Dufour et Cie (1752–1827) of Mâcon, France. In 1773, Charvet travelled to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean on business for his uncle, and stayed for four years producing many studies of native flora and fauna, as well as landscapes. By 1785, he had established a drawing school in Annonay, south of Lyon. Annonay had been a papermaking region since the Sixteenth Century.

Charvet’s reputation rests on twenty-panels of scenic wallpaper titled Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Savages of the South Pacific) which combine to form a neoclassical depiction of the explorations of Captain James Cook. The wallpaper was shown in Paris at the Exposition des produits de I’industrie francaise in 1806. Charvet died in Tournon-sur-Rhône, France in 1829.

Captain Cook first sailed from England to the South Seas in 1769. He made three expeditions before his death in 1779, and his adventures captured the imaginations of many Europeans at a time when there was considerable interest in the “primitive” and “exotic”. His discoveries lent support to the prevailing notion of the inherent moral superiority of “the noble savage”, an idea expressed in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).

In 1784, accounts of Cook's voyages were set forth in an official three-volume publication. Accompanying this was a separate folio atlas containing 61 engravings of landscapes, portraits, and indigenous artifacts.

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