Johann Georg Wille
Born Königsberg, Hessen, 5 Nov 1715; died Paris, 15 April 1808.
Engraver, collector, dealer and patron. Apprenticed to an alcoholic painter and then to a gunsmith, he moved to Paris in 1736. Penniless, and with only rudimentary training as a draughtsman and engraver, he first found employment engraving metalwork for gunsmiths. He was then commissioned by a printseller, Michel Odieuvre (1687–1756), to do some (badly paid) plates for the Recueil des portraits des rois de France (1738; Portalis and Beraldi, no. 87). An introduction to Hyacinthe Rigaud from the German engraver Georg Friedrich Schmidt (1712–75) led Rigaud to offer Wille the opportunity to engrave his portrait of Charles Fouquet, Maréchal de Belle-Isle (1743; pb 35). This, and an engraving of Rigaud’s wife, Elisabeth de Gouy (1743), made Wille’s reputation. For the next ten years he concentrated on portraits, notably after Rigaud (e.g. Jean de Boullongne, 1748, pb 38) and after Louis Tocqué (e.g. Charles Edward Stuart, 1748, pb 42; Comte de Saint-Florentin, 1751, pb 78; and Jean-Baptiste Massé, 1755, pb 70).
Wille’s studio became one of the most important printmaking centres in Paris, and a meeting-place for artists, collectors, dealers and, above all, young German engravers who wanted to train in Paris, including Balthazar Anton Dunker and Franz Edmund Weirotter. As a result he had considerable influence on engraving in Germany. However, unlike Jacques-Philippe Lebas, who ran the other great Paris studio, Wille worked alone on the plates he signed. After obtaining French citizenship he was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in 1755; for six years he worked on his morceau de réception, a portrait of the Marquis de Marigny (pb 69) after Tocqué, completing it in 1761. This was the last portrait he engraved, since his deteriorating eyesight no longer allowed him to engrave with the precision he demanded for his portraits. During the 1750s, however, he had also begun to engrave genre scenes and pictures from the northern schools. In 1754 he engraved a Death of Cleopatra (pb 13) after Caspar Netscher, which he followed with several plates after Gerrit Dou, including Woman Winding Wool (1755; pb 7) and Woman Reading (1762; pb 18) as well as the Cook (1764) after Peter Adolf Hall. Wille made full use of the free access he had to the best collections in France of Dutch paintings, including those of the Comte de Vence, Jean de Jullienne, Louis Simon Lempereur and Johann Anton Peters.
An avid collector himself, Wille bought paintings, drawings, engravings, medals and curios at public sales and he also commissioned paintings. The collection he sold in December 1784 was only a small proportion of the number of works that had passed through his hands, even though the catalogue lists 100 paintings and over 4000 drawings: Wille kept the best works while frequently re-selling others he had bought or commissioned. In this way he was able to help German and Swiss artists, including Weirotter and Johann Balthazar Bullinger I, to become known in Paris, often acting as a middle-man for French collectors and such foreigners as Charles-Frederick, Grand Duke of Baden (d 1811), and for Frederick V of Denmark (1723–76). His success as a cultural intermediary between the French and German worlds resulted in Wille’s election to membership of several foreign academies, including Augsburg (1756), Vienna (1768), Copenhagen (1770) and Berlin (1771). Wille owned drawings by Rigaud, Adam Frans van der Meulen, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and many others. Of the 17th-century Dutch paintings in his collection he made engravings after Godfried Schalcken’s Family Concert (1767–9; pb 16) and Isaack van Ostade’s Good Friends (1776; pb 15); he also made engravings after some of the paintings by his contemporaries that he owned, including Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich’s Wandering Musicians (1764; pb 4) and Hagar Introduced to Abraham by Sarah (1775; pb 2), and Pompeo Batoni’s Death of Mark Antony (1778; pb 1). His love of genre painting brought him close to Greuze, to whom he entrusted as a pupil his son (2) Pierre-Alexandre Wille. From the 1770s his son’s work constituted the essence of his purchases and provided the subject-matter for his last engravings. By the 1780s he had virtually retired from engraving but continued to augment his stock of plates by ordering more from Weirotter, Robert Daudet, Joseph de Longueil and other former pupils. Having sold his collection of paintings and drawings in 1784 he sold his prints in December 1786. By the time of the French Revolution, an event he greeted with satisfaction, he had become blind and lived out his final years in straitened circumstances. His way of using the burin to engrave most of each plate in very precise and regular strokes was universally acclaimed by contemporaries, and it was his best pupil, Charles-Clément Bervic, who under the Empire became the leading French engraver.
Between May 1759 and October 1793 Wille kept a Journal. Its almost daily entries record not only his own social and working life but also the art life of Paris and the activities of its principal figures, providing an unusually detailed source for the last decades of the ancien régime. Wille’s own formative years are covered in the Mémoires he compiled in his eighties.
Christian Michel. "Wille." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T091629pg1 (accessed April 27, 2012).
