Jacques Carrey

Jacques Carrey (born January 12, 1649 in Troyes , † February 18, 1726 ibid) was a French painter and draftsman . He became known through a series of drawings that were made in 1674 of the then largely intact pictorial decorations of the Parthenon in Athens and which are (possibly incorrectly) attributed to him.

Carrey was a pupil of Charles Le Brun , the court painter to Louis XIV. On Le Brun's recommendation, in 1670, together with several young artists, he accompanied the diplomat and antique collector Charles-Henri-François Olier de Nointel , who was the French ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople . into the Ottoman Empire . He was commissioned to make drawings of the most important buildings and locations. Between 1670 and 1679 Carrey made over 500 drawings of everyday life in the Ottoman Empire, on which he documented cities, antiquities, customs, festivals and rituals in Greece , Asia Minor and Palestine . His drawings are kept in the Louvre in Paris . The drawings of the Parthenon ascribed to him are of particular documentary value, as they are the only representations of its pictorial decorations, which were largely destroyed in the explosion of the Parthenon in 1687 .

literature

• Irini Apostolou: Jacques Carrey (1649-1726) et ses dessins orientaux: un artiste troyen au service de l'ambassadeur de France à la Sublime Porte . In: Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire de l'art français, 2001, pp. 63-87