Jean-Baptiste Le Prince

He then travelled to Paris around 1750 after being sponsored by Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet de Belle-Isle and became a leading student of the great painter, François Boucher.

[4] In 1758, Le Prince journeyed to Russia to work for Catherine the Great at the Imperial Palace, St. Petersburg, under Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli.

When Le Prince returned to Paris in December 1763, he brought with him an extensive collection of drawings which he employed as the basis for a number of fine paintings and etchings.

Le Prince's graphic art of Russia and its peoples is significant in that he based his compositions entirely upon his own designs, lending a much more realistic portrayal to his views than other eighteenth century contemporaries.

[6] He may even have been the inventor of aquatint,[7] the tonal graphic art that would later be so skillfully used by such masters as Goya, Louis-Philibert Debucourt, Delacroix and Thomas Rowlandson.