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Gaucher, Charles-Etienne
(b Paris, 1741; d Paris, 18 Nov 1804). French engraver and writer. He trained as a reproductive engraver with Pierre-François Basan and later with Jacques-Philippe Lebas but soon turned to small-scale engraving. He specialized in the extremely meticulous execution of small portraits; he made more than 100 of these, the most popular being those of Marie Leczinska, Queen of France (1768; Pognon and Bruand, no. 40) after Jean-Marc Nattier and the portrait of the Comtesse du Barry (1770; PB 45) after Hubert Drouais. His greatest work was the Crowning of the Bust of Voltaire at the Comédie Française (PB 154) after a drawing by Jean-Michel Moreau (i) (1778; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam), on which he worked from 1778 to 1782. Gaucher was also a writer on theory and wrote several articles on engravers for the Abbé de Fontenai’s Dictionnaire des artistes as well as obituaries of Lebas and Jean-Jacques Flipart for the Journal de Paris and several polemical writings in defence of engraving. The Académie des Sciences asked him to write a treatise on the art of engraving; he abandoned this at the onset of the French Revolution, and only his Essai sur l’origine et les avantages de la gravure (1798) gives some idea of it.
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