Biography

French painter, part of a family of artists. Between 1732 and 1750 he was in Stockholm with his father, Guillaume-Thomas Taraval, who was also his first teacher. At his father's death he went to Paris and entered the studio of Jean-Baptiste Pierre. In 1756 he won the Prix de Rome with Job Reproached by his Wife (Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts), and then spent the years 1756-59 at the Ecole des Elèves Protégés. From 1759 to 1763 he was at the Académie de France in Rome.

On his return to France he was approved (agréé) at the Académie Royale in 1765 with Venus and Adonis (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum). He was received (reçu) as a full member in 1769 with the Triumph of Bacchus (in situ) for the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre and was appointed a professor in 1785. His work as a decorative painter, exemplified in the Apotheosis of Psyche (c. 1773) on the ceiling of the Salon Doré of the Hôtel Grimod d'Orsay, Paris, was in great demand: he also received commissions for the Château de Bellevue (1762), the Ecole Militaire (1773), Paris, the Collège de France (1777), Paris, the château of Versailles (1780) and the château of Marly (1781; all destroyed). He was appointed an inspector of the Gobelins factory in 1783.