Background
Desportes was born in Champigneulle, Ardennes.
Desportes was born in Champigneulle, Ardennes.
He studied in Paris, in the studio of the Flemish painter Nicasius Bernaerts, a pupil of Frans Snyders.
During a brief soujourn in Poland, 1695-1696, he painted portraits of John III Sobieski and Polish aristocrats. After the king"s death Desportes returned to Paris, convinced that he should specialise in animals and flowers. He was received by the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in 1699, with the Self-Portrait in Hunting Dress now in the Musée du Louvre.
In 1712-1713 he spent six months in England.
He received many commissions for decorative panels for the royal châteaux: Versailles, Marly, Meudon, Compiègne and, his last royal commission, for Louis XV at Choisy, 1742. He also did decorative paintings for the duc de Bourbon at Chantilly.
Desportes would follow the royal hunt with a small notebook he carried to make on-site sketches for still lives of the game that resulted from the day"s hunt, for the king to make a choice of which were to be worked up into finished paintings. In several paintings he combined game with a buffet of spectacular pieces of silver as they might be displayed in a dining room.
These are precious documents of the lost silver of the reign of Louis XIV. His details of trophies of game or animals were used in cartoons for tapestry in which work of several painters was combined, woven at the Savonnerie and at the Gobelins (Portière de Diane, Louvre).
Foreign the Gobelins he designed the series of tapestries called Les Nouvelles Indes. In 1784, the comte d"Angiviller, general director of the Bâtiments du Roi acquired these resources for painter"s models at the manufactory of Sèvres porcelain, so that Desportes" influence in the iconography of French arts extended almost throughout the century.
Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture.