Simon François Ravenet ARA (1706 - 1774)

Simon François Ravenet ARA (1706 - 1774)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

Engraver born in Paris and trained there with Jacques Philippe Le Bas. Some sources (e.g. DNB), state that he was born in 1721.

In 1743 he was brought to London by William Hogarth to work on the Marriage à la Mode series. He appears to have remained in Britain for the rest of his career. The majority of Ravenet’s work was produced for the publishers Robert Sayer, John and Paul Knapton, and, especially, John Boydell, contributing to his Collection of Prints, Engraved from the most Capital Paintings in England (1769-72). In 1759 or 1760 Ravenet worked again with Hogarth on two illustrations after the artist for the second edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (vol. 1, 1760; vol. 4, 1761).

In 1745-6 Richard Dalton employed Ravenet to engrave a series of large prints of classical sculpture in Italian collections and, with Jean Baptiste Claude Chatelain, to engrave a scene from book 6 of Milton’s Paradise Lost. In 1752 he engraved the first of the large plates after John van Rymsdyck’s drawings showing the dissection of a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy for William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, eventually published in 1774. In 1753 he engraved Benjamin Wilson’s painting David Garrick and Miss Bellamy as Romeo and Juliet.

Ravenet was on the committee of the Society of Artists in 1767 and in 1770 joined the Royal Academy as one of only six associate engravers.

His son, Simon François Ravenet the Younger, was also an engraver. Some sources state that he had another son, Jean-François Ravenet who was also an engraver.