Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty

Color plate by Jacques Gautier d'Agoty, showing some of the muscles of the head. Part of a series of illustrations from Myologie complete en couleur et grandeur naturelle (1746) with texts by French physician and anatomist Guichard Joseph Duverney, 1746

Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty (1716–1785) was a French anatomist, painter and printmaker.

D'Agoty was born in Marseille, and became a pupil of the painter and engraver Jacob Christoph Le Blon, with whom he became a rival for title of the invention of a method of an color-printing method based on etching and mezzotint engraving. He later exploited this process with his four sons: it is significant that he published a journal that included color printed images.

Gautier d'Agoty was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon, he teamed with the physician and anatomist Guichard Joseph Duverney to produce anatomical albums. Together with his son, Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, they produced a French Gallery and universal gallery of portraits of famous men and women, which only appeared in the first deliveries in 1770 and 1772. D'Agoty died in Paris.

References

• Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001, p. 276.
• Bamber Gascoigne, Milestones in colour printing (1457-1859), Cambridge University press, 1997, p. 12
• John Gorton, A General Biographical Dictionary, Henry G. Bohn, London, vol II, 1851.
• Arthur M. Hind, A History of Engraving and Etching. From the 15th Century to the year 1914. Being the Third and Fully Revised Edition of "A Short History of Engraving and Etching", Dover, New York, 1963, p. 309.
• Sarah Lowengard, 'Jacques-Fabien Gautier, or Gautier d'Agoty' The Creation of Color in Eighteenth Century Europe. New York: Columbia University Press 2006