Delafosse, Jean-Charles (1734-1789)

Jean-Charles Delafosse was a French decorative designer, engraver and architect. Apprenticed for a time to a sculptor, by 1767 he styled himself an architect and professor of design. He published the first volume of his most important work, Nouvelle Iconologie Historique in 1768. It contained 110 plates of his designs for furniture, decorative arts and architectural ornaments in the Louis XVI style, most of which he also engraved himself. As the title implies, each design also has specific iconological or symbolic content. De La Fosse also manipulated abstract shapes in ingenious and innovative ways to create spatial illusions and ambiguity. Long before late 20th-century Postmodernism he exhibited an allied sensibility: according to the Grove Dictionary of Art, “he divorced familiar architectural elements, the base of a column, a pediment, a single Ionic volute from their usual functions and placed them in new and witty contexts.”

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