Hubert-François Bourguignon, commonly known as Gravelot (26 March 1699 – 20 April 1773), was a French engraver, a famous book illustrator,[1] designer and drawing-master.

Unsuccessful in a commercial venture at Saint Domingue on his father's account, he returned to Paris and became the pupil first of Jean II Restout, and then of François Boucher.

[4] Though French-trained craftsmen, engravers and even some painters,[5] were already working in London, but the Rococo style in luxury works of art was relatively new: the Spitalfields silk industry, always dominated by Parisian innovations rendered by Huguenot designers and weavers, produced its earliest asymmetrical and naturalistic floral designs in the early 1730s,[6] and the earliest identified full-blown Rococo piece of London silver, by the second-generation Huguenot Paul de Lamerie, can be dated about 1731.

[7] Gravelot's trip was not a speculation; he had been invited by Claude du Bosc to engrave designs for an English translation of Bernard Picart's Ceremonies and Religious Customs of... the Known World.

"[9] George Vertue noted in 1741 that Gravelot's "drawings for Engraving and all other kinds of Gold & Silver works[10] shews he is endowed with a great fruitfull genius for desseins inventions of history and ornaments"[11] By that time Gravelot had become a central figure in the artistic set that gathered at Slaughter's Coffee House in St Martin's Lane and formed the St. Martin's Lane Academy organised by William Hogarth in the premises of his father-in-law Sir James Thornhill.