Cheron, Lewis

, the brother of Elizabeth Cheron, was born at Paris in 1660; and having been taught the rudiments of the art in his own country, he travelled to Italy, where his sister supplied him with a competency, to | enable him to prosecute his studies for eighteen years. During his continuance in Italy, he made the works of Raphael and Julio Romano the principal object of his studies, by which his future compositions had always a certain air of the antique, though he had no great portion of grace, and his figures were frequently too muscular. Two of his pictures are in the church of Notre Dame, at Paris; the one, of Herodias holding the charger with the head of St. John the Baptist; the other, of Agabus foretelling the persecution of St. Paul. On account of his religion, being a Calvinist, he was compelled to quit his native country, and settled in London, the happy retreat of all distressed artists; and there he found many patrons among the nobility and gentry, particularly the duke of Montague, for whom he painted the Council of the Gods, the Judgment of Paris, and he was also employed at Burleigh and Chatsworth; but finding himself eclipsed by Baptist, Rousseau, and La Fosse, he commenced painting small historical pieces. His most profitable employment, however, was designing for painters and engraver ^ and his drawings were by some preferred to his paintings. He etched several of his own designs, and in particular, a series of twenty-two small prints for the life of David, with which Giffart, a bookseller at Pans, ornamented a French edition of the Psalms published in 1713. Strutt notices also two engravings which he executed from his own designs, of great taste, “The Death of Ananias and Sapphira,' and” St. Paul baptising the Eunuch." His private character was excellent. He died in 1713, of an apoplexy, at his lodgings in the Piazza, CovenNgarden, and was buried in the porch of St. Paul’s church in that parish. He had some time before sold his drawings from Raphael, and his academy figures, to the earl of Derby, for a large sum of money. ¹