Young Girl Holding a Bird

In 1757, a printmaker named Jean-Charles François developed a printing technique to make facsimiles of chalk drawings. He perfected his method by inventing tools with toothed points of varying thicknesses set at irregular intervals and angles, imitating the random character of grains of chalk on textured paper. Gilles Demarteau adopted François's specialized implements to copy the chalk drawings of such well-known artists as Jean Baptiste le Prince and François Boucher.