Artist: Simon-Charles Miger (French, 1736 – 1828)
Title: Marivaux (Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux)
Medium: Antique engraving on laid paper.
Signature: Signed in the plate, lower right.
Dimensions: Image Size 7 3/8 x 10 3/8 inches.
Framed Dimensions: Approximately 16 x 19 inches.
Framing: This piece has been professionally matted and framed using all new materials.
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (4 February 1688 – 12 February 1763), commonly referred to as Marivaux, was a French novelist and dramatist. He is considered one of the most important French playwrights of the 18th century, writing numerous comedies for the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne of Paris. His most important works are Le Triomphe de l’amour, Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard and Les Fausses Confidences. He also published a number of essays and two important but unfinished novels, La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu.
Simon-Charles Miger was a French engraver, most notable for the plates he produced for La Ménagerie du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle by Lacépède, Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier. Son of a tanner who sent him to study in Paris, Miger took various jobs including teacher, tutor and secretary before discovering a passion for engraving. He apprenticed to Charles Nicolas Cochin, which employed him as a clerk, and attended the workshop of Johann Georg Wille. He developed into a portraitist, and then fell in love with a woman with whom he courted for four years until his situation finally allow her to marry him. In 1778, Miger was accredited by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, where he was admitted as a member in 1781. During the French Revolution, he argued alongside Jean-Michel Moreau and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard for the renovation of the statutes that were falling into disrepair. “The laws of the state, he says, are granted by the French people, those of the Academy shall be through all académicien people.” But these reform proposals were rendered obsolete by the abolition of Academies, decreed by the National Convention in 1795. In 1800, Miger is charged with Bernard Germain de Lacépède to engrave the planks of his work on the menagerie of the National Museum of Natural History. He then continues to handle the chisel and compose verses until the age of nearly 90 years.