Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Chéron, Louis
CHÉRON, LOUIS (1655–1725), painter and engraver, was born in Paris on 2 Sept. 1655. He was the son of Henri Chéron, a French miniature painter in enamel and an engraver, who died at Lyons in 1677. After having received some instruction from his father, he was enabled by the liberality of his sister to visit Italy, where he particularly studied the works of Raphael and Giulio Romano. On his return to Paris he was in 1687, and again in 1690, commissioned by the corporation of goldsmiths to paint the ‘mai’ which they offered every year on 1 May to the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The subject of the first picture was ‘The Prophet Agabus before Paul;’ that of the second was 'Herodias.' Both are now in the Louvre. Being a Calvinist, he was forced by the religious troubles which followed the revocation of the edict of Nantes to leave France in 1695, when he came to England and found a patron in the Duke of Montagu, for whose mansion at Houghton he painted ‘The Assembly of the Gods,' ‘The Judgment of Paris,’ and other works. He was also employed at Burleigh and Chatsworth, but he fell into discredit when he painted at Montagu House in competition with Rousseau, Baptiste, and Delafosse. His work, however, was not much esteemed; for although his drawing was correct, his composition was tame and inanimate, and his colouring cold and feeble. Subsequently he turned his attention to making designs for the illustration of books, and these are better than his paintings. Among them are designs for an edition of Milton’s ‘Poetical Works’ issued in 1720, and a series of plates to illustrate his sister Sophie’s French version of the Psalms published at Paris in 1694, the latter of which he himself engraved, although in a very indifferrent manner. Robert Dumesnil describes twenty-eight plates by him. Those from his own designs comprise also ‘St. Peter healing the Lame at the Gate of the Temple,' 'The Death of Ananias and Saphira,' 'The Baptism of the Eunuch by St. Philip,' and the 'Labours of Hercules,' a series which was finished by Van der Gucht, Bernard Picart, and Claude Dubosc. Chéron died in London, in Covent Garden, on 20 May 1725, from an attack of apoplexy, and was buried in the porch of St, Paul's, Covent Garden.
The engraving's after Chéron's paintings include 'Diana and her Nymphs bathing,' by Bernard Baron; 'The Sacrifice of Iphigenia' and 'The Coronation of George I,' by Claude Dubosc; and 'The Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria' and 'Nymph and Satyrs,' by Nicolas Charles Dupuis.
Two of Louis Chéron's sisters, Elisabeth-Sophie and Marie-Anne, adopted their father's profession of miniature painting. Sophie, who was born on 6 Oct. 1647, and died on 3 Sept. 1711, was likewise a poetess and an accomplished musician. Both married late in life, Marie-Anne becoming the wife of the painter Alexis-Simon Belle.
[Bryan's Dict. of Painters and Engravers, ed. Graves, 1886; Redgrave's Dict. of Artists of the English School, 1878; Bellier de la Chavignerie's Dictionnaire des Artistes de l'Ecole Française, 1868–85, i. 252; Jal's Dictionnaire critique de Biographie et d'Histoire, 1872; Haag's France Protestante, 1877, &c., iv. 286–7; Dussieux's Artistes Français à l'étranger, 1856, p. 128; Robert-Dumesnil's Peintre-Graveur Français, 1835–71, iii. 285–95, xi. 35–7; Political State of Great Britain, 1725, xxix. 503.]