Drawing by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince

A black ink and sepia wash drawing by French artist Jean-Baptiste Le Prince of a classical scene of Roman soldiers with camel signed and dated lower left. This work appears to be a page cut from a sketch book as it is double sided (reverse is a charcoal sketch of two soldiers with former collection numbers and notations) and likely a preliminary drawing for a painting or a sketch of an earlier work in the Winter Palace. Work measures 8.75" by 6.75" and is conservation mounted and French matted in a neoclassical gilt-gesso frame with museum glass.

Biography: Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (September 17, 1734 – September 30, 1781) was a renowned French etcher and painter. He first studied in Metz and travelled to Paris in 1750 and became a leading pupil of François Boucher (1703–1770). In 1758, Le Prince was commissioned by Catherine the Great to work at the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg. He remained in Russia for five years and returned to Paris in December, 1763 with an extensive collection of drawings which he employed as the basis for future paintings and etchings. Le Prince was elected a full member of the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in 1765. Le Prince's style is significant in that he based his compositions entirely upon his own designs, lending a much more realistic portrayal to his views than his contemporaries. He is often credited as the inventor of 'Aquatint', the intaglio printmaking technique that produces areas of tone rather than lines, as he was the first artist to introduce aquatint into his etched and engraved plates beginning in 1768 and later used extensively by Goya, Debucourt, Delacroix, and Rowlandson. Le Prince's works are in the permanent collections of many of the world's preeminent museums, including the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the Louvre, Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery, and the Courtauld Institute, London, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian, Washington D.C., Art Institute of Chicago, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.