Pierre Lelu

1741–1810, Paris

The painter, draughtsman and etcher, Pierre Lelu, was a pupil of François Boucher and Gabriel François Doyen. In 1762 he went to Italy, where he mostly copied Old Masters, returning to Paris around 1767. He is known to have undertaken two further journeys to Italy in 1775 and 1789. Lelu also travelled to Spain and Portugal in 1775. The artist became a member of the Academy in Marseilles in 1778, but was never admitted to the Académie royale in Paris. Only a few of his paintings have survived, but the corpus of his drawings and especially of his prints is quite extensive.