Charles-Dominique-Joseph EISEN
Valenciennes 1720 - Brussels 1778
Biography
Born in Valenciennes in northern France, Charles Eisen was the son of a painter. He moved to Paris in 1741, and there trained as an engraver in the studio of Jacques-Philippe Le Bas, where he remained until 1746. One of his first significant independent commissions was for a series of illustrations for a volume commemorating the engagement of the Dauphin to Maria Theresa of Spain, published in 1745, while two years later he provided drawings for an edition of the poems of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. Eisen is indeed best known for his book illustrations and vignettes for such works as Jean-Baptiste Descamps’ four-volume La vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandois, published between 1753 and 1763, and Voltaire’s epic poem Henriade, which appeared in 1770, as well as editions of the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1762) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1767-1771). He also painted pastoral landscapes, religious and mythological scenes and genre subjects, as well as a handful of portraits, although very few of his works on canvas survive. Eisen became court painter and draughtsman to Louis XV and served as drawing master to Madame de Pompadour. Although he was admitted as a history painter into the artist’s confraternity in Paris, the Académie de Saint-Luc, in 1750 – where three years later he is recorded as a drawing teacher and where he exhibited regularly until 1774 – Eisen never gained entry into the more prestigious Académie Royale. In 1753 he published a book of ornamental designs, while a book of engravings in the crayon manner appeared in 1757. His pre-eminence as a book illustrator was confirmed with the publication in 1770 of the Recueil de divers petits sujets agréables d’après Eisen et autre maîtres, wherein the majority of the works reproduced were after drawings by Eisen, alongside examples by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, François Boucher and Hubert-François Gravelot. In 1777, heavily in debt and pursued by creditors, Eisen left Paris for Brussels. He died there a few months later, at the age of fifty-eight.
