Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune

Jean-Michel Moreau (26 March 1741 – 30 November 1814), also called Moreau le Jeune ("the younger"), was a French draughtsman, illustrator and engraver.

Moreau le Jeune, as he is usually called, was born in Paris. He was the pupil of the painter Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain who accompanied his master to St Petersburg in 1758 when Le Lorrain went to be the first director of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts established the previous year, where Moreau briefly taught drawing before returning to Paris in 1759, after Le Lorrain's unexpected death.

He worked for the engraver Jacques-Philippe Lebas, producing reproductive drawings of contemporary paintings and those of Old Masters for engravers to work from and learning etching During the 1760s he also provided drawings to be engraved for the Recueil d’antiquités of the comte de Caylus, who kept a benevolent watch over him. For Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopédie he provided pen and wash drawings for the engravers, illustrating artisanal processes. As an engraver he collaborated with François Boucher, Hubert Gravelot and others on illustrations for an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In 1765 Moreau married Françoise-Nicole Pineau, daughter of François Pineau, master sculptor, and Jeanne-Marie Prault - whose father was Pierre Prault, patriarch of a family of publishers, privilègiés du Roi.

In 1770 he succeeded Charles-Nicolas Cochin as chief Dessinateur des Menus Plaisirs du Roi, on Cochin's recommendation, which occasioned his prints celebrating the marriage of the Dauphin and his coronation as Louis XVI; in 1781, in part on the strength of these productions he was appointed Dessinateur et Graveur du Cabinet du Roi, which brought an annual pension and lodgings in the galleries of the Palais du Louvre. Now he found that he required the services of other engravers to reproduce his own designs, which included illustrations for the Chansons of Jean-Benjamin de La Borde (1773), the collected works of Rousseau (1773–82) and of Voltaire (printed at Brussels, 1782–9). For the Menus Plaisirs, the office that produced and executed all the designs for settings of court festivities and recorded them in presentation drawings, he recorded many occasions such as his famous pen-and-wash record of the inauguration in September 1771 of Mme du Barry's Pavillon de Louveciennes (illustration, right). He still found time for intimate portrait drawings in charcoal and chalks

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