Antoine-Jean Duclos

Antoine-Jean Duclos, born in 1742 in Paris where he died in 1795, is a French draftsman and engraver.

Born in Paris, Duclos is the pupil of Augustin de Saint-Aubin, whose drawings he reproduces. He later became one of the most gifted vignettists of his generation, performing many small-format illustrations that were very much in vogue in the second half of the eighteenth century. He was also good at preparing copper work, serving other writers and painters such as François Boucher, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Jean-Michel Moreau, Charles Eisen, Hubert François Gravelot, Charles Monnet, And Clement-Pierre Marillier.

Antoine-Jean Duclos was a pupil of the draughtsman and engraver Augustin de Saint-Aubin, whose drawings he often reproduced as prints.

Adept at the art of engraving and etching on a small scale, Duclos is perhaps best known as a book illustrator, his first efforts in this field coming around 1765.

Alongside Charles-Nicolas Cochin and Hubert François Gravelot, he provided illustrations and vignettes for the Almanach iconologique, published between 1774 and 1781, and also contributed illustrations for such works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Oeuvres and Choiseul-Gouffier’s Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce.

Much of his work was in the form of engravings after drawings by other artists, notably Cochin, Gravelot, Charles Eisen, Clément-Pierre Marillier and Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard. Duclos is recorded as exhibiting at the Salon just once, in 1795.

If he excelled in small formats, he also made engravings of large dimensions, working on plates of 18.1 × 13.49 cm or even beyond, such as Le Bal paré after Saint-Aubin (1773 -1774).

He collaborated in the illustration of numerous works by classical and contemporary authors, such as Jean Racine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Barthélemy Imbert, Jean-François Marmontel, etc., but also thematic albums such as Voyage en Sibérie (Debure father, 1761), the Monument of Costume (1777-1783), or the mythological Almanac (Belin, 1791).

Under the direction of Basan and Le Mire, he contributed to the in-quarto edition of the Metamorphoses d'Ovide in 4 volumes (Despilly & Pissot, 1767-1771), illustrated by the best engravers of the time.

During the first years of the Revolution, he participated in the elaboration of several major engravings such as The Execution of Louis XVI presented by Isidore Stanislas Helman to the Convention in 1794.

Drawings by Duclos - ‘quelques dessins à la facture petite et gentillette’, in the words of Edmond de Goncourt – are rare. In their Les graveurs du dix-huitième siècle, published between 1880 and 1882, Roger Portalis and Henri Béraldi noted that ‘Duclos était en outré un excellent dessinateur, dont la manière rappelait celle de Gravelot; nous avons vu de lui un certain nombre de dessins, qu’il a généralement gravés lui-même, pour des pièces de théâtre.’
https://hisour.com/artist/antoine-jean-duclos/