Jean Marc Nattier (1685-1766)

• Was a French painter.
• He was born in Paris.
• He was the second son of Marc Nattier, a portrait painter and of Marie Courtois, a miniaturist.
• He received his first instruction from his father, and from his uncle, the history painter Jean Jouvenet.
• He enrolled in the Royal Academy in 1703 and applied himself to copying pictures in the Luxembourg Palace.
• In 1715 he went to Amsterdam, where Peter the Great was then staying, and painted portraits of the tsar and the empress Catherine.
• Nattier declined an offer to go to Russia.
• Between 1715 and 1720 he devoted himself to compositions like the "Battle of Pultawa", which he painted for Peter the Great, and the "Petrification of Phineus and of his Companions", which led to his election to the Academy.
• The financial collapse of 1720 caused by the schemes of Law all but ruined Nattier, who found himself forced to devote his whole energy to portraiture, which was more lucrative.
• He became the painter of the artificial ladies of Louis XV's court. • He died in Paris in 1766.
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