Biography

French painter and etcher (also spelt Le Clerc). He was born into a family in the service of Duke Charles III of Lorraine (reg. 1559-1608). He perhaps had his earliest training in the then independent duchy. He is said to have spent more than 20 years in Italy but is first recorded there in 1617, in the house in Rome of the Venetian painter Carlo Saraceni. His earliest known etching, a Death of the Virgin after Saraceni, was published in Rome in 1619. In 1621 he signed the mural Doge Enrico Dandolo Recruiting for the Crusade in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge's Palace in Venice. This work had been begun, or at least designed, by Saraceni before his death the previous year. As a reward Leclerc was made a knight of the Order of San Marco.