Alexandre François Desportes Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

At the age of twelve, Alexandre-François Desportes was sent by his father to Paris to study painting, in the studio of the Flemish painter Nicasius Bernaerts, a pupil of Frans Snyders. In his thirties for the years 1695–96, he went to Poland, where he painted many portraits of members of the Polish royal family, he painted portraits of John III Sobieski and Polish aristocrats. After the Polish king's death, Desportes returned to Paris, convinced that he should specialize in animals and flowers.

He was accepted by the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1699 when he showed his Self-Portrait in Hunting Dress. In 1712–13 he spent six months in England. Returning to France, Louis XV commissioned him for many decorative panels for the royal residences at Versailles, Marly, Meudon, Compiègne and, Choisy. Both Louis XIV and Louis XV commissioned portraits of their favorite hunting dogs with Desportes.

Alexandre-François Desportes would follow the royal hunt with a little notebook he carried to make sketches of the game from the day's hunt, the king would make a choice of which ones he liked to be made into finished paintings.

Sketches and paintings of game trophies and animals were used in cartoons for tapestry. A cartoon is derived from the Italian cartone, a full-scale preparatory design sheet. The works of several painters were combined, woven at the Savonnerie and the Gobelins factories.

At his death in Paris in 1743, he left a lot of work in his studio which included studies of animals and plants as well as some hunting sketches. Forty years later the Comte d'Angiviller, general director of the Bâtiments du Roi, in charge of buildings and decorations, acquired these assets as design models for the manufacture of Sèvres porcelain. Alexandre-François Desportes' continued his influence on the iconography of French arts.

Art Movement: Baroque.
Artists Influencing Alexandre-François Desportes: Nicasius Bernaerts.
He Traveled To Poland, England.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.