Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié

1735-1784, Paris

The painter, Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié, received his initial training from his father, the court engraver and secretary to the academy, Bernard Lépicié (1698-1755), and was then apprenticed to Carle van Loo. He entered the Académie Royale as an agréé with a historical painting in 1764 and became a full member of the academy the same year. Lépicié made a successful academic career for himself in a relatively short space of time and became a professor in 1777. Although trained as a history painter, a discipline in which he was successful for a long time thanks to the official commissions he received, the last years of his life were overshadowed by a deep creative crisis, for his contemporaries valued him above all as the author of entertaining, highly decorative genre scenes and as a willing portraitist of Parisian society. Lépicié’s works were thus quickly forgotten after his death.