Jean-Michel Moreau

Now he found that he required the services of other engravers to reproduce his own designs, which included illustrations for the Chansons of Jean-Benjamin de La Borde (1773), the collected works of Rousseau (1773–82) and of Voltaire (printed at Brussels, 1782–9).

In his prolific career his best-known works are those twenty-four illustrations that record fashionable dress and interiors of the last years of the Ancien Régime, his contributions to the Monument du costume physique et morale,[7] twelve as a Suite d'estampes pour servir à l'histoire dews mœurs des François au dix-huitième siècle, 1776 and 1777, and twelve more in the Troisième Suite d'éstampes pour servir a l'Histoire des Moeurs et du Costume..., 1783, published by his uncle by marriage, L.-F. Prault, and many times re-issued in varying formats, notably in a collection in 1789 with text by Restif de la Bretonne.

Each of the first dozen of these vignettes of stylish contemporary life has an element of anecdote, reporting in a cohesive and unified manner "a highly idealized vision of an aristocratic family's approach to childbearing and motherhood based on the philosophy of Rousseau" (Heller-Greenman).

In the second suite, a hint of criticism of aristocratic duplicity in affairs of the heart can be discerned and some rural vignettes vertueuses (sentimental and virtuous) provide a contrasting social world in the manner of Greuze.

Moreau le Jeune's reputation was resuscitated from oblivion in the later nineteenth century by the connoisseurs of the dix-huitième Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.