LALLEMAND, Jean-Baptiste
(b. 1716, Dijon, d. ca. 1803, Paris)

Biography

French painter and draughtsman. He was the son of a Dijon tailor who taught him his own craft. In 1739 he moved to Paris to study painting, possibly with Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni. He is said to have travelled to England early in his career. In September 1745 he was made a member of the Académie de St Luc in Paris, and in 1747 he settled in Rome. During his 14 years in the city - interrupted only by a trip to Naples - he was in contact with such French artists as the painters Etienne Parrocel, Claude-Joseph Vernet (whose Italianate manner may have influenced Lallemand) and Jean Barbault, and the architect Charles de Wailly. (He later worked with de Wailly after his return to France, painting views of the château of Montmusard (c. 1770; Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts) from the architect's drawings.) He frequented the Académie de France at a time when the architectural draughtsmen Charles-Michel-Ange Challes, Nicolas-Henri Jardin and Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain were there. In 1755 he taught Robert Adam landscape drawing. He worked on frescoes (destroyed) in the Palazzo Corsini, painting four landscapes in 1750 as well as adding figures to enliven views by Vincenzo Torrigiani (fl mid-18th century). At about this time he executed four large paintings of antique architecture (St Petersburg, Hermitage) for the Anitchkov Palace in St Petersburg. In 1758 he painted the Finding of Moses (Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana), intended to decorate the papal bedchamber in the Palazzo Quirinal. Four large vedute in the Villa Lante at Bagnaia may also have been painted in Rome.

Lallemand returned to France in 1761, exhibiting a number of views of Naples and Rome at the Academie de St Luc. Between 1770 and 1773 he was in Dijon, where he was a member of the jury for the new Ecole de Dessin, and it was at this time that he began contributing drawings for the 12 volume 'Voyage Pittoresque de la France', providing 140 views in all. In 1783 he exhibited a number of landscapes at the Salon de Correspondance.