Claude Jacques Notte

An eighteenth-century French painter and draftsman, Claude Jacques Notte is best remembered in the history of graphic arts as the designer behind some of the most enduring and visually dramatic iconographies of the American Revolutionary War. A pupil of the celebrated historical painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Notte possessed a refined academic sensibility that he successfully channeled into the highly commercial, fast-paced world of the late-eighteenth-century Parisian print trade.

While Notte was a competent painter of portraits and allegorical scenes, his historical legacy was largely secured through his collaborations with elite contemporary printmakers. His designs were meticulously calculated to feed the intense public appetite for current events, naval heroism, and the romanticized figures of the American War of Independence.

Notte’s most significant contribution to Americana is undoubtedly his portrait of Commodore John Paul Jones, painted immediately following the Battle of Flamborough Head in September 1779. Engraved by the master Carl Guttenberg and published by the prominent firm of Esnauts et Rapilly, Notte’s composition perfectly captured the fierce determination of the naval hero. By placing Jones on a smoke-filled, battling deck within a classical architectural frame, Notte created an iconic, definitive likeness that satisfied a French nation completely gripped by "Jones-mania."

Though his later career spanned the tumultuous decades of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, it is his sharp, dramatic compositions from the early 1780s that remain highly prized by connoisseurs of maritime and military prints.

References Cresswell, Donald H. The American Revolution in Drawings and Prints: A Checklist of 1776–1790 Graphics in the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1975.

Sellers, Charles Coleman. Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.

Portalis, Roger, and Henri Béraldi. Les graveurs du dix-huitième siècle. Vol. 2. Paris: Damascène