Lot 121: Benard Engraving from Diderot c. 1780

Robert Benard (1734, Paris – 1777) was an 18th-century French engraver. Original engraving, circa 1780, platemark size approx. 13 x 8-1/4 in. VG. Title is DRAPERIE (cloth-making). Benard is mainly famous for having supplied a significant amount of plates (at least 1,800) to the Encyclopédie by Diderot & d'Alembert from 1751. Later, publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke reused many of his productions to illustrate the works of his catalog. Denis DIDEROT (1713-1784), French Encyclopedist and philosopher, who also wrote novels, essays, plays, and art and literary criticism. Diderot was born in Langres on Oct. 5, 1713, and educated by Jesuits. He went to Paris in 1734 and spent ten years as an ill-paid tutor and hack writer. His first serious work, published anonymously, was Pensées philosophiques (1746), which stated his deist philosophy. In 1747 he was invited to edit a French translation of the English Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers (1680?-1740). Diderot, collaborating with the mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, converted the project into a vast, new, and controversial 35-volume work, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers, which is usually known as the Encyclopédie. Aided by the most celebrated writers of the day, including Voltaire and Montesquieu, the skeptical, rationalist Diderot used the Encyclopédie as a powerful propaganda weapon against Ecclesiastical authority and the superstition, conservatism, and semifeudal social forms of the time. Consequently, Diderot and his associates became the objects of clerical and royal antagonism. In 1759 the Conseil du Roi formally suppressed the first ten volumes (published from 1751 onward) and forbade further publication. Nevertheless, Diderot continued work on the remaining volumes and had them secretly printed. The 17 volumes of text were completed in 1765, with plates and supplements added until 1780. Diderot's voluminous writings include the novels La religieuse (The Nun, 1796), an attack on convent life; Le neveu de Rameau (1761, or later; Rameau's Nephew, 1964), a social satire; and Jacques le fataliste (1796), which explored the psychology of free will and determinism. Lettre sur les aveugles (1749), about the way the blind learn, and the dramatic philosophical dialogue Le rêve d'Alembert (1830) contain his materialist theories. A pioneer in aesthetic criticism, he founded (1759) Les Salons, a journal for which he wrote criticism of the annual Paris art exhibitions. His correspondence was unexcelled in an age of famous letter writers. Diderot won the patronage of the enlightened monarch Catherine the Great of Russia and greatly influenced other Enlightenment thinkers in Europe. He died in Paris on July 30, 1784.

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