Jean-Baptiste Joseph Wicar

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Wicar (1762–1834) was born in Lille, the son of a carpenter, and studied drawing at the free school there before training in the studio of Jacques-Louis David. His drawings of the paintings, statues and cameos of the Florentine galleries and the Pitti Palace were published in Paris in four volumes between 1789 and 1807. A Neoclassical painter, he was also closely involved in the French seizures of art: he headed the commission that removed works from the Austrian Netherlands for French museums in 1794, and served on the commission that followed Bonaparte's Italian campaign. He settled permanently in Rome in 1800 and became a portraitist with a European reputation. He died there, leaving his collection of some 1,300 drawings, including sheets by Raphael and Dürer, to a learned society in Lille; it formed the Musée Wicar, which merged in 1866 into the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Here: Marriage of Virgin.