Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays
Encyclopedia
Life
Deshays was born in CollevilleColleville
Colleville is a commune in the Seine-Maritime department in the Haute-Normandie region in northern France.-Geography:A farming and light industrial village situated in the wooded valley of the Valmont River and the Pays de Caux, some northeast of Le Havre, at the junction of the D68 and D28...
. His first training was under his father, the minor Rouen
Rouen
Rouen , in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie region and the historic capital city of Normandy. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe , it was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...
painter Jean-Dominique Deshays, he then spent a little time under Jean-Baptiste Descamps
Jean-Baptiste Descamps
Jean-Baptiste Descamps was a French writer and painter of village scenes.Descamps was born in Dunkirk, but lived principally at Paris, till an accidental circumstance fixed him at Rouen, in 1740...
at his Ecole Gratuite de Dessin. He spent time in Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont
Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont
Hyacinthe Collin' de Vermont was a French painter.Collin de Vermont was a pupil of Jouvenet and of Rigaud.-Works:* Bacchus changes the Maenads' works into vine foliage, Musée de Versailles...
's Paris studio from around 1740 to 1749 and Jean Restout II
Jean II Restout
Jean II Restout was a French painter, whose late baroque classicism rendered his altarpieces, such as the Death of Saint Scholastica an "isolated achievement" that ran counter to his rococo contemporaries.-Biography:...
's from late 1749 to 1751. Both these had been pupils of Jean Jouvenet
Jean Jouvenet
Jean-Baptiste Jouvenet was a French painter, especially of religious subjects.He was born into an artistic family in Rouen...
, and painted in the Grand Style of French history painting, a style Deshays adopted as his own.
While he was in Restout's studio, Deshays entered the Prix de Rome competition, winning second prize in 1750 with
His 1750 Laban Giving his Daughter in Marriage to Jacob won the second prize in the Grand Prix de Rome, and his 1751 Job on the Dung-hill the first prize. Deshays served the compulsory three years training at the Ecole des Eleves Protégés (where he learnt from Carle van Loo, its director, and attracted some religious commissions, including two vast canvases, a Visitation and an Annunciation, for the monastery of the Visitation at Rouen), before going to Rome. He then spent 4 years under Charles-Joseph Natoire
Charles-Joseph Natoire
Charles-Joseph Natoire was a French painter in the Rococo manner, a pupil of François Lemoyne and director of the French Academy in Rome, 1751-1775...
at the French Academy in Rome
French Academy in Rome
The French Academy in Rome is an Academy located in the Villa Medici, within the Villa Borghese, on the Pincio in Rome, Italy.-History:...
, making several copies of works by Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...
, Domenichino, Guercino and the Carracci
Carracci
There are several notable people with the name Carracci:* Agostino Carracci , Italian painter and printmaker* Annibale Carracci , Italian Baroque painter and brother of Agostino Carracci...
s. On Deshays' return to Paris in 1758, he got married to Boucher
François Boucher
François Boucher was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture...
's elder daughter, and a year later became a full academician, though he only exhibited at 4 official Salon
Paris Salon
The Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world...
s. He died in Paris.