Gilles Demarteau The Elder
French, born Flemish, 1722-1776
French engraver and print publisher. He was descended from a family of gunsmiths. In 1739 he went to Paris to join a brother who had established himself there as a goldsmith. Beginning as an engraver and chaser, in 1746 he obtained the rank of master. As early as 1757 he began to specialize in crayon manner (see Crayon manner, §2) using a roulette, a process that brought him success; Jean-Charles François contributed in developing this process, but Demarteau, because of his superior skill, outstripped his rival. At a time when drawing was greatly in vogue, he offered the public faithful reproductions, first of red chalk drawings and then of drawings intended for decoration or teaching, in two or three colours, by contemporary artists. His oeuvre comprises 560 numbered plates, half of them after specially provided drawings by François Boucher (for illustration see Crayon manner) or after drawings owned by collectors such as Blondel d’Azincourt. Demarteau also engraved some 40 drawing manuals, consisting of collections of plates after Edme Bouchardon, Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Hoüel and Jean-Baptiste Huet I (see Huet, (2)). He was a protégé of Charles-Nicolas Cochin (II) and was praised by Denis Diderot; in 1769 he was admitted (reçu) to the Académie Royale with his engraving after Cochin of Lycurgus Wounded (exh. 1769 Salon; Roux, no. 142 bis). In 1770 he succeeded François as Graveur des Dessins du Cabinet du Roi.
Demarteau’s nephew Gilles-Antoine Demarteau (c. 1750–1802), who was his pupil and collaborator, succeeded him in his business in the Rue de la Pelleterie. He mostly continued to publish prints from existing plates, though he also made a few engravings of genre scenes, such as Autumn (1786; r 47) after Huet, printed in colour with careful registration. In 1788 Gilles-Antoine Demarteau published a Catalogue des estampes gravées au crayon d’après différents maîtres of the Demarteau collection; this catalogue included both his and his uncle’s plates in the same numbering system.
Madeleine Barbin. "Demarteau, Gilles." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T022092 (accessed March 8, 2012).
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