Jean-Baptiste Huet

Who was Jean-Baptiste Huet?

Jean-Baptiste Marie Huet was a French painter, engraver and designer associated with pastoral and genre scenes of animals in the Rococo manner, influenced by François Boucher.

Born into a family of artists— his uncle was Christophe Huet, his father Nicolas Huet—he apprenticed with the animal painter Charles Dagomer, a member of the painters' guild, the Académie de Saint-Luc, Paris, who was working in the 1760s. Huet’s interest in printmaking and his acquaintance with Gilles Demarteau, who later engraved many of his compositions, both date from this period. About 1764 Huet entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, where he further developed his printmaking skills, largely reproducing his own paintings, a method of publishing them with some profit.

In 1768 he was approved by the Académie Royale, and 29 July 1769 he was received in the minor category of painter of animals and was well received in the public reviews when he began to exhibit at the Paris Salon that same year, with a Dog Attacking Geese, now at the Louvre. He continued to exhibit annually until 1789, through his attempts at the grand manner of history painting, considered the noblest genre, were not met with approval.