Biography

French painter, part of a family of artists. Daniel Hallé and his son Claude-Guy Hallé were active in Paris in the 17th century and the early 18th, chiefly as painters of religious scenes, and enjoyed high contemporary reputations. Claude-Guy's son Noël Hallé was one of the major French painters of the 18th century and received many commissions from the Crown, from the Church and from the city of Paris. His sister Marie-Anne Hallé (b. 1704) married the painter Jean Restout II, a nephew of Jean Jouvenet, in 1729. The family was thus part of a network of related artists who dominated the areas of history and religious painting in the early and middle decades of the 18th century. Noël Hallé was a painter, draughtsman and printmaker. After studying architecture he became the pupil of his father and of his brother-in-law Jean Restout II. In 1736 he won the Prix de Rome, and he spent the period from 1737 to 1744 at the Académie de France in Rome. There he made a copy (untraced) of Raphael's Heliodorus Driven from the Temple (Rome, Vatican, Stanza d'Eliodoro), which he intended for a tapestry cartoon for the Gobelins, as well as executing drawings and engravings after antique monuments and works of art. On his return to Paris, he was approved by the Académie Royale in 1746 and received (reçu) as a full member in 1748 on presentation of the Dispute of Minerva and Neptune over Choosing a Name for the City of Athens (Paris, Louvre). He became a professor at the Académie in 1755 and was named Surinspecteur de la Manufacture des Tapisseries de la Couronne at the Gobelins in 1770. In 1775 he was entrusted with the reorganization of the Académie de France in Rome, neglected by its aging director Charles-Joseph Natoire; he was rewarded for his efforts by ennoblement and the Order of St Michel. He was treasurer of the Académie Royale from 1776 to 1781 and became rector in the year of his death.