Jean-Jacques François Lebarbier the Elder

1738 Rouen – 1826 Paris

Lebarbier, a painter, draughtsman and art theoretician, studied under Jean Baptiste Marie Pierre at the Académie Royale in Paris. He subsequently undertook the obligatory sojourn in Rome and travelled to Switzerland, where he struck up a friendship with Salomon Gessner. He was accepted (agrée) by the academy in 1780 and made a full member in 1785. Lebarbier was known principally as a history painter and drawer of illustration designs. He worked in a refined and restrained classical formal idiom characteristic of the era of Louis XV.