Gilles-Louis Chrétien
Gilles-Louis Chrétien (born February 5, 1754 in Versailles , † March 4, 1811 in Paris ) is considered to be the inventor of the Physionotrace .
Life
Gilles-Louis Chrétien was born in Versailles in 1754. He took up the same profession as his father, a chamber musician at the king's court, and became a cellist . As a talented portrait artist and engraver , he developed a device that partially mechanized the process of portraying. In 1786 he went public with his invention, the Physionotrace . The new process basically consisted of a mechanically produced profile line, which was graphically completed, reduced in size, converted into an etching and then reproduced. From 1787 Chrétien worked with the miniaturist Quenedey and went to Paris. Quenedey drew and Chrétien made the etchings. He secured a place in portrait history through some portraits of famous contemporaries (the Dauphin , Mme de Stael, Marat, Robespierre) and numerous travelers who visited Paris. In the autumn of 1789 Quenedey set up his own studio and in December of the same year Chrétien called on Jean Fouquet as a draftsman, who was replaced by Jean Simon Fournier after 1794, but probably not until 1799 (temporarily?) , Who supposedly until around 1800, worked for Chrétien until 1805 at the most. Gilles-Louis Chrétien died in Paris in 1811. The great success of his invention is based less on the fact that his apparatus mechanized the process of portraying (it only did that to a very small extent), but rather in the rationalization of work processes and the formal standardization of the product "portrait", which without the Revolutionary ideal of egalité is hardly conceivable.
literature
- Gisèle Freund : Photography and Society . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, ISBN 3-499-17265-8 . (partly Univ. Diss., Paris, 1936)
- Marcel Roux: Inventaire du Fonds Français, Graveurs du XVIII siècle. 4th volume, Paris 1940, pp. 493-496.
Web links
- Information on Gilles-Louis Chrétien in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Chrétien, Gilles-Louis |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Inventor of the Physionotrace |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 5, 1754 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Versailles , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 4, 1811 |
| Place of death | Paris |