Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (17.09.1734–30.09.1781) was the youngest of the children of Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Le Prince (the elder), a craftsman- carver and sculptor, and his third wife Anne Gautier; he was the half-brother of the famous French novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711-1780).

Le Prince studied painting techniques in his native Metz (Moselle, north-eastern France). Then, in 1750, the young man travelled to Paris, where he became one of the best pupils of painters François Boucher and Joseph-Marie Vienne. Early works of Le Prince were similar to those of his teachers in their choice of themes, subjects and manner. Imitating François Boucher, Le Prince created compositions that represented a special kind of pastoral ‘genre scenes’.

In addition to drawing and painting, Jean Baptiste Le Prince experimented with etching techniques. In the history of graphic arts, he is known as the inventor of copperplate engraving. He tried to develop the techniques of aquatint¹⁾, Le Prince began to work directly on the plate with a brush soaked in diluted solution of acid in the ‘pouring’ technique, with gradient fill. Denis Diderot noted that such images, exhibited at the Salon of 1769, were said to be ‘deceptive and they could never be mistaken for engravings’. Circa 1768, Leprince began to combine stroke etching with aquatint.

In 1752, Jean Baptiste Le Prince married a wealthy maiden, Gipon, who was almost twice his age. In 1756, the young man escaped from her to Italy, and two years later – to Russia.

In 1758, Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, at the invitation of Count Ivan Shuvalov, arrived in Russia (first in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow, where two of his brothers and sister were already staying) with a group of artists to work at the Academy of Arts, which had just been established by Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Le Prince lived in Russia for about five years, worked in St. Petersburg and Moscow, travelled through Finland, Lithuania and Siberia (some researchers believe that Le Prince only reached Kazan). Le Prince left Russia in May 1762, visiting Livonia on the way. He returned to Paris in December, 1763 with an extensive collection of drawings, which he later used to create paintings and engravings.

In 1765, J.B. Leprince was elected a full member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris.

The museum Collection repository features a gold enamel snuff-box, the lid of which is decorated with the image of a couple in oriental clothes consulting a fortune-teller. The miniature realized in painted enamel, is set in rectangular frame; the edges of the lid are decorated with the laid on belt of foliage ornament, made of gold and pearls and set on a blue enamel background.

The plot of the scene is based on the painting ‘The Necromancer ’, created by Jean Baptiste Le Prince circa 1775. The artist created three versions of the story: one of the paintings is now in the National Gallery in London, another in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and the third one is in the private collection. intriguingly, the original depicts the figure of the fortune teller as a seated grey-haired old man dressed in a figured dressing gown, rather than the attractive young Turk with a turban reproduced on the enamel image.

The enamel scene is probably the work of Jean-Abraham Lissignol (1749-1819), known as Lissignol, père to distinguish him from his son Abraham who was also an enameller in Geneva; Lissignol, père was trained bу Jean-Marc Rou. As well as painting plaques for snuff boxes, he also supplied workshops with portrait miniatures for watch cases and boxes.

¹⁾Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone.