Edme Quenedey

Edme Quenedey
self-portrait from 1803

Edme Quenedey (born December 17, 1756 in Riceys-le-Haut , † February 16, 1830 in Paris ) was a French portrait artist .

biography

Quenedey settled in Paris as a portrait miniaturist in 1785 and worked from April 1788 to August 1789 as a draftsman and partner in the studio of Gilles-Louis Chrétien , the inventor of the Physionotrace , a device that partially mechanized the process of portraying. Quenedey made the only picture of the Physionotrace apparatus, a drawing that allowed the reconstruction of the machine and the working process of the portraying it supports. On August 18, 1789, the collaboration between the draftsman Quenedey and the inventor and etcher Chrétien broke up. He ran his own Physionotrace workshop at different addresses until 1795, but then went to Hamburg via Antwerp and Brussels in 1796 , where portraits of him can be traced back to that same year. In August 1801 he was back in Paris and traded at 15 rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs until his death in 1830. His daughter Aglaée continued the studio for an uncertain time.

Work and meaning

Quenedey is considered a skillful popularizer of Chrétien's invention. It has been calculated that in good years his productivity averaged two Physionotrace portraits per day. The formal shape of his standardized portraits follows exactly the model of Chrétien: A portrait in profile can be seen in a round (diameter approx. 6 cm) or high oval image section and is accompanied by a printed signature on the lower round . B. after 1801 reads: “ Dess. au Physionotrace et gravé par Quenedey rue neuve des Petite-champs No. 15 à Paris ”. Accordingly, he is not only to be regarded as a draftsman of the portraits, but also translated them into the copperplate , more precisely into the etching.

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  Gadso Coopmans

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  Pierre Joseph Beauchamp , 1798

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  Pierre Gaveaux , Bibliothèque nationale de France , 1821

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  Johann Peter Sieveking , 1796 in Hamburg

literature

• Gustav Kowalewski: Bou-Magic and Physionotrace. A contribution to the history of the portrait in Hamburg , magazine of the Association for Hamburg History, 22, 1918, pp. 168–179.
• René Hennequin: Un "photographe" de l'époque de la Révolution et de l'Empire: Edme Quenedey; portraitist au physionotrace . 2 volumes., Troyes 1926/27.

Web links

Commons : Edme Quenedey  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Illustration of a physionotrace