HUBER, Jean

Painter, silhouettist, draughtsman and printmaker, member of a Swiss family of artists. His paternal ancestors were patrician Genevese merchant bankers. As a young man he soldiered at Kassel in Germany and in Italy, where he fought for Savoy in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48). In 1752 he was elected to Geneva’s Council of Two Hundred and served his native city as a magistrate. He had no formal artistic training, but from his youth he clipped out of paper or cards freehand profiles of a kind that later came to be called silhouettes. He also devised what he called tableaux en découpures, cut in vellum or parchment on the scale of large reproductive prints; these represented antique subjects, landscapes and genre scenes. He is best known for his witty paintings, cut-out profiles, prints and drawings of the writer and thinker Voltaire.

Voltaire Planting Trees

Huber executed a cycle of paintings depicting the daily life of Voltaire. This cycle was offered to Catherine II of Russia, nine of cycle are at present in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Voltaire Narrating a Fable belongs to this cycle, although critics assume that it may be a copy after one of Huber’s works in this cycle either by Huber himself or perhaps by Liotard after an Huber original.

Voltaire Narrating a Fable

Voltaire Planting Trees

Voltaire Welcoming his Guests

Voltaire's Morning