Self Portrait
(b Geneva, 22 Dec 1702; d Geneva, 12 June 1789).
Swiss pastellist, painter, printmaker and writer. He was born to French Protestant parents, who had fled to Switzerland after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Having studied with the miniature painter Daniel Gardelle in Geneva, in 1723 he travelled to Paris, where until 1726 he was a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Massé. In 1734 he submitted his only known history painting, King David and the High Priest Abimelech in the Tabernacle (untraced, see Humbert, Revilliod and Tilanus, no. 110), for the painting prize of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, but it was rejected. He subsequently travelled to Naples and then to Rome, where he executed a portrait of Pope Clement XII (untraced). In Florence he met Sir William Ponsonby (1704–93), later 2nd Earl of Bessborough, whom he accompanied to the Levant in 1738, breaking the journey in Capri, Messina, Syracuse, Malta and the Greek islands; there, seduced by the beauty of Eastern dress, he made a large number of acute and charming drawings in black and red chalks (Paris, Louvre; Paris, Bib. N.).
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