Jean-Baptiste Marie Huet

JEAN-BAPTISTE MARIE HUET (Paris, 1745-1811).
"Ancient ruins".
Pair of watercolors.
Signed at the bottom.
Measurements: 21 x 15,5 cm.(each); 36,5 x 30,5 cm.(frames).

Jean-Baptiste Marie Huet was a French painter, engraver and designer associated with pastoral and genre scenes of animals in the Rococo style, influenced by François Boucher.

Born into a family of artists-his uncle was Christophe Huet and his father, Nicolas Huet-he was apprenticed to the animalistic painter Charles Dagomer, a member of the painters' guild, the Académie de Saint-Luc, in Paris, working in the 1760s. Huet's interest in engraving and his friendship with Gilles Demarteau, who later engraved many of his compositions, date from this period. Around 1764, Huet entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, where he further developed his skills in engraving, largely reproducing his own paintings, a method of publishing them at some profit.

In 1768 he was approved by the Académie Royale, and on July 29, 1769 he was admitted to the category of animal painter and was well received in public reviews when he began exhibiting at the Paris Salon that same year, with a Dog Attacking Geese, now in the Louvre. He continued to exhibit annually until 1789, although his attempts to tackle historical painting, considered the noblest genre, were not well received.

The most important of his paintings were his morceaux de réception, The Fox Among the Hens (San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor) and The Milkmaid (Paris, Musée Cognacq-Jay).

Huet is equally well known for his designs for the decorative arts. He provided scenic vignettes to be printed in copper on cotton at the toiles de Jouy factory run by Oberkampf. Examples of these can be seen at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many other institutions. His ink and gouache drawings and studies of animals and children are also admired.

In the 1780s he provided tapestry cartoons for the Beauvais factory. A series of thirteen pastoral tapestries was part of Isaac de Camondo's bequest to the Louvre. In 1790 he continued to be associated with the Gobelins and Beauvais tapestry factory, which was reorganized and merged.