Study of Six Heads

Study of Six Heads is a beautiful black and white etching with drypoint interventions on paper, realized at the end of the XVIII century by the French artist Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (Lyon, 1736 - 1810).

Signed on plate on the lower right margin “ De Boissieu ”. The inscription of the plate number is on the higher right corner " 10 ".

This old master’s original print with lifetime impressions is in very good conditions, except for a usual yellowing of the paper especially on the edges and some signs of the passing of time. Nevertheless, the print has preserved its original beauty.

Six studies of heads (four elder men, a middle-aged man at the center, and a woman with a turbant), etched with a superb technical skill and an incredible draftsmanship, are drawn in various dimensions and with different degrees of finish, deserving the dignity of six individual portraits all together.

Jean-Jacques de Boissieu  (Lyon, 1736 –1810) was a French artist who studied at the École de Dessin in Lyon, but he was mostly self-taught. His earliest prints were realized between 1758 and 1764. When he went to Italy in the retinue of the ambassador and Duc de la Rochefoucauld d’Enville, he had a lifechanging encounter: he met  Voltaire  and entered the world of luminaries, and had the opportunity of realizing some plates for Diderot-d’Alembert’s Encyclopèdie. He then continued to produce prints in Lyon: many etchings of the Roman and Dutch countryside, as well as the French countryside around Lyon, earning a reputation as the last representative exponent of the older etching tradition.