Pesne, Vernet, Saint-Aubin

The next three engravings show the diversity of Melville’s collection. Antoine Pesne was a Frenchman who studied in Italy but became the court painter to Emperor Frederick I, and then Emperor Frederick II, in Berlin. Pesne specialized in royal portraits but the one engraving Melville acquired depicts an engraver and his wife. Claude-Joseph Vernet was the leading painter of seascapes in France in the second half of the eighteenth-century, when he received a major commission from King Louis XV, but the shipwreck that Melville acquired was engraved in color by an English artist-engraver. Augustin de Saint-Aubin was nurtured in the rococo style that dominated the Académie Royale during the artistic ascendancy of Boucher, several of whose works Saint-Aubin engraved. He is represented in Melville’s collection by a cul-de-lampe he created for the catalogue of the gem collection of the Duc d’Orléans—only a few years before the French Revolution led to the breakup of that collection, along with an abrupt end to the artistic continuity of the Académie Royale as it had developed from the time of Bosse and Le Brun through Jouvenet, Watteau, Boucher, Pesne, and Vernet.