During the reign of Louis XIV. France was at the head of Europe in the art of engraving and was represented by Robert Nanteuil (q.v.), Glcrard Edelinek, a Fleming, who had migrated to Paris. and Antoine Masson, who worked after paintings by the great artists of the day, hut without a minute adherence to the original. Nanteuil was indeed the inventor of those de vices, those combinations of lines and dots and that excess of crosshatching, which were so abused by his successors; but his own work is of ahnost uniform good taste and dignity— formal, indeed, in the spirit, of the time, but re taining a force and tire rather characteristic of the original work than of the copyist. Jean Pesue engraved the paintings of Poussin with a similar Coldness. transferring the artist's com position from the canvas to the smaller study In black and while. Gr.rard Audran (d. 1703) was able to give power to huge prints, rather closely studied from the paintings of his con temporaries, Mignard and Poussin, as well as to reproductions of Raphael's wall pieces.
In the eighteenth century line-engraving is delicate and refined and the portraits of the time are of singular interest, but it is devoted to a more feeble system of design and largely used for hook illustration. The celebrated Lirres a
vignettes, illustrated by Charles Eisen, Charles Nicolas Cochin, Pierre Philippe Choffard, and Nicolas De Launay, as the most celebrated of a large school of engravers, form a separate branch of art study, the number of the works being very great and their merit singnlarly uniform. In still later times, Volpato (d. 1803) and Raphael Morghen (d. 1833) carried over the assumed grand style of the earlier workmen into the nine teentb century; and with their works closes the history of line-engraving of the traditional school. Everything since the Napoleonic wars has been in a way tentative. here and there powerful and self-centred artists like Francois Forster (d. 1892) and llenriquel-Dupont (d. 1892) followed a resolute working in the spirit of such a period or such a master of the past as their personal characteristics made easy, and producing valued prints. Since 1850 line-engraving has been kept alive mainly by the Government institution La chalcographie de Louvre, there being only one or two very ex ceptional artists to glorify the second half of the nineteenth century. The chief of these, Fer dinand Gaillard, is one of the greatest artists in black and white of our time.