Jean-Démosthène DUGOURC
Versailles 1749 - Paris 1825
Biography
A hugely inventive and gifted artist and designer, Jean-Démosthène Dugourc was active as a painter, draughtsman, watercolourist, decorator, engraver and sculptor, while also producing designs for book illustrations and frontispieces, furniture, stage sets and costumes, and fabrics. Born to a wealthy and socially prominent family – his father was in the service of the Duc d’Orléans – the young Dugourc was permitted to study alongside the Duc’s son Louis Phillipe II, the future Phillipe-Egalité, who was two years older. He received a classical education at the Oratorian-run Collège de Jully and showed an aptitude for drawing and an interest in perspective and the study of architecture from an early age. At fifteen Dugourc made a brief trip to Rome, where he met the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who inspired a fondness for antiquity in the young artist. Following the death of his mother and the loss of his father’s wealth after a lawsuit, Dugourc decided to devote himself to a career as a professional artist. In 1776 he married the sister of the architect François-Joseph Belanger, Inspecteur des menus-plaisirs and court architect to Charles-Philippe, Comte d’Artois and brother of Louis XVI, and the future Charles X. Dugourc began collaborating with his brother-in-law on the decoration of the chateaux of Bagatelle, Saint-Cloud and Maisons. He also designed country houses and gardens for two of the wealthiest men in France, the banker Jean-Joseph de Laborde and the financier Claude Baudard de Saint-James, Treasurer of the Navy, while other clients included the Duchesse de Mazarin and the Duc d’Aumont.
In 1780 Dugourc was appointed designer in the household of the King’s brother, the Comte de Provence, for whom he worked on the decoration of the Château de Brunoy, now demolished. Two years later he published a series of engravings entitled Arabesques. In 1784 he was named dessinateur du garde-meuble de la couronne; in this role he was responsible for the design of interiors, furnishings and objects for the various royal palaces and chateaux, until the Revolution. Dugourc was, in fact, one of the first artists to introduce arabesque ornamentation, as well as Etruscan motifs, into architecture, furniture and fabrics during the reign of Louis XVI. He also provided scenery for the Paris Opéra and worked for the Swedish, Spanish and Russian courts, as well as supplying designs for cabinetmakers such as Georges Jacob and for the Pernon silk manufactory in Lyon between 1774 and 1790. In 1800 he went to Spain, where he was appointed architect at the court of Charles IV. Dugourc worked in Spain for fourteen years, in Madrid and at Aranjuez and the Escorial, and among his patrons were such members of the Spanish aristocracy as the Duchess of Alba and the Duchess of Osuna. Within two years of his return to France in 1814 he was reinstated as dessinateur du garde-meuble, working at the Tuileries and for the tapestry manufactories at Savonnerie and Beauvais, as well as continuing to produce designs for Pernon. Dugourc died in Paris in 1825, at the age of seventy-five.
Large groups of drawings by Dugourc are today in the collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris – mainly designs for projects commissioned by the Royal family - and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon. Other drawings by the artist are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Cooper Hewitt Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and elsewhere.
