François-Robert INGOUF the Younger (Paris, 1747 - 1812) Memento Mori Black stone, blush, white chalk highlights and a touch of red chalk. Signed lower right: "ingouf le jeune". 37,1 x 25,4 cm Provenance : Probably sale after the artist's death, Paris, March 8-11, 1815, part of no. 135. A student of Jean-Jacques Flipart and later of Jean-Georges Wille, Ingouf became an engraver, like his older brother Pierre-Charles Ingouf. The prints of Ingouf the Younger are distinguished, in the eyes of his contemporaries, by the delicacy of the burin, the grace and variety of the sizes, and the purity of the tints. Antoine-Vincent Arnault will say of him: "He knew, with the only combination of the black and the white, unique resource of the engraving to return the nature with fidelity, to give a right idea of the harmony and the color of the paintings which he translated, talent all the more rare that it often happens that the engraver who believes to seize it falls in the manner and the exaggeration" (Biographie nouvelle des contemporains, or Historical and reasoned Dictionary of all the men who, since the French Revolution, acquired celebrity, The historical bookshop and of arts and trades of Émile Babeuf, volume ninth, 1823, p. 320-321). We know a self-portrait of the artist, preserved in the museum of Versailles, where one distinguishes as in this drawing the acuity of the artist.