Frontispiece, from "Recueil de Compositions par Lagrenée Le Jeune" (Collection of Compositions by Lagrenée the Younger)
Medium
Etching and aquatint
Dimensions
Sheet: 15 7/16 × 21 9/16 in. (39.2 × 54.8 cm) Plate: 8 9/16 × 11 3/8 in. (21.8 × 28.9 cm)
Classification
Prints|Ornament & Architecture
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Purchase, The Arthur Ross Foundation Gift and Charles Z. Offin Fund, 1999
Accession Number
1999.2(1)
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the elegant world of 18th-century French decorative arts with this captivating *Frontispiece* from *Recueil de Compositions parrenée Le Jeune* (1782), created by Jean-Jacques Lagrenée the Younger (1730–3). As the ornate title page for a collection of the artist's compositional designs, it likely features graceful figures—men, women, and infants—arranged in a harmonious, ornamental tableau. Lagrenée, a prominent Rococo painter and draftsman, was renowned for his delicate history scenes and decorative motifs, bridging the lavish curves of Rococo with emerging Neoclassical restraint on ...
About the Artist
Jean Jacques Lagrenée · 1739–1821
Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, known as Lagrenée the Younger (1739–1821), was a distinguished French history painter, draftsman, and engraver born into a family of artists in Paris. The younger brother of the prominent Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée (Lagrenée the Elder), he studied under his elder sibling at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, honing his skills in the rigorous academic t...