Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fourdrinier, Peter

1044182Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 20 — Fourdrinier, Peter1889Lionel Henry Cust

FOURDRINIER, PETER (fl. 1720–1750), engraver, a member of a French refugee family which fled from Caen to Holland, was a pupil of Bernard Picart at Amsterdam for six years, and came to England in 1720. He was employed in engraving portraits and book illustrations; among the former were the portraits of Cardinal Wolsey and Bishop Tonstall in Fiddes's ‘Life of Wolsey,’ John Radcliffe, M.D., after Kneller, William Pattison, poet, after J. Saunders, William Conolly, speaker of the House of Commons in Ireland, after Jervas, Jonathan Swift, after Jervas, Dr. John Freind, after M. Dahl, and Thomas Wright, after G. Allen. He was more frequently employed on architectural works, to which his mechanical style of engraving was well suited. He engraved plates for Cashel's ‘Villas of the Ancients,’ Ware's ‘Views and Elevations of Houghton House, Norfolk,’ Sir W. Chambers's ‘Civil Architecture,’ Wood's ‘Ruins of Palmyra,’ and others from the designs of Inigo Jones, W. Kent, and other architects. He also engraved ‘The Four Ages of Man,’ after Lancret, one of Lemprière's views of Belem, near Lisbon, before the earthquake, and the illustrations to Spenser's ‘Calendarium Pastorale’ (London, 1732, 8vo). He is perhaps identical with Pierre Fourdrinier, who married at Amsterdam in 1689 Marthe Theroude, and came to England. Other authorities mention a Paul Fourdrinier as engraver of some of the works mentioned, and he has been identified with Paul Fourdrinier who was of the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and died in January or February 1758, leaving by his wife Susanna Grolleau a son Henry, whose daughter Jemima was the mother of Cardinal John Henry Newman. The engravings are in all cases signed ‘P. Fourdrinier,’ but the title-page of Chambers's ‘Civil Architecture’ says that the plates were engraved by ‘Old Rooker, Old Fourdrinier, and others,’ which points to there having probably been two engravers of the name.

[Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Vertue's MSS. (Addit. MS. Brit. Mus. 23079); Dodd's manuscript History of English Engravers; Bromley's Engraved British Portraits; Lowndes's Bibl. Man.; information from H. Wagner, F.S.A.]

L. C.