Benoît Louis Prévost
French, 1747-1804
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A student of Jean Ouvrier, Prévost was a skilled craftsman, much more so than his master. He engraved more than sixty of Charles Nicolas Cochin's drawings with great fidelity and precision. The most well-known of his works is the 1765 frontispiece of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (often known just as the "Encyclopédie"), edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, depicting "la Raison et la Philosophie arrachant son voile à la Vérité rayonnante de lumière" ("Reason and Philosophy catching the sunbeams of Truth"), engraved from Cochin's drawing of 1764.