Bernard Picart

Bernard Picart or Picard (11 June 1673 – 8 May 1733), was a French draughtsman, engraver, and book illustrator in Amsterdam, who showed an interest in cultural and religious habits.

[6] There Picart, Marchand and Charles Levier belonged to a "radical Huguenot coterie", who studied the works of John Locke, which promoted the separation of church and state.

[7][a] They joined the Walloon church but were influenced by Jean Claude and Pierre Bayle who both fled to the Dutch Republic in earlier years.

His pupils included Jacob Folkema, Jakob van der Schley (who portrayed him posthumously), Pieter Tanjé and François Morellon la Cave, who all used his drawings for engravings.

In 1723/1726 Anna Yver, his mother-in-law and two of her children lived at Rokin; Picart may have used most floors for teaching drawing and engraving or storing paper.

His most famous work is Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, appearing from 1723 to 1743 and in collaboration with Jean Frédéric Bernard, a successful author and publisher who promoted religious tolerance and gallicanism.

The illustrations were used in various publications including the Figures de la Bible (1720) and the Taferelen der voornaamste geschiedenissen van het Oude en Nieuwe Testament (1728).

Jonathan I. Israel[14] calls Cérémonies "an immense effort to record the religious rituals and beliefs of the world in all their diversity as objectively and authentically as possible".

[15] They put religion in comparative perspective, offering images and analysis of Jews, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, the peoples of the Orient and the Americas, Protestants, deists, freemasons, and assorted sects.

For the next century it was copied or adapted, but without the context of its original radicalism and its debt to clandestine literature, English deists, and the philosophy of Spinoza.

The artists involved were Michel de Marolles, Bernard Picart, Jacques Favereau, Abraham van Diepenbeeck, and Cornelis Bloemaert.