Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768-1848)

• Was a French painter.
• Debret studied at the French Academy of Fine Arts, a pupil of the great Jacques-Louis David to whom he was related.
• His debut was at the Salon des Beaux Arts of 1798, where he got the second prize.

• He travelled to Brazil in March 1816 as a member of the so-called French Artistic Mission.

• It was a group of bonapartist French artists and artisans bound to creating an arts and crafts lyceum in Rio de Janeiro under the King D. João VI and the Count of Barca.
• The lyceum later became the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes.

• He established his atelier at the Imperial Academy in December 1822 and became a valued teacher in 1826.

• He started to sketch street scenes, local costumes and relations of the Brazilians in the period between 1816 and 1831.

• He took a particular interest in slavery of blacks and in the indigenous peoples in Brazil.

• Debret returned to France in 1831 and became a member of the Academie des Beaux Arts.

• From 1834 to 1839 he published his series of three volumes of engravings, titled "A Picturesque and Historic Voyage to Brazil, or the Sojourn of a French Artist in Brazil".

• Unfortunately the work was not a commercial success.

• In order to survive, he made lithographs depicting paintings by his distant cousin David.

• Debret died poor in Paris in 1848.

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