J. CHRISTOPHER LE, a painter of portraits and other subjects in miniature, was born at Frankfort in 1670. He became known at Rome in the year 1716, being at that time painter to the Count Martinetz, ambassador at that court. He next went to Amsterdam; and, after some years' residence in the Low Countries, he came to England, where he established a new method of printing mezzotinto plates in colours, so as to imitate the pictures from which they were copied. This invention,—which was not his own, but borrowed from Lastman and others,—consisted in having several mezzotinto plates for one piece, each expressing different shades and parts of the piece in different colours. Le Blond next embarked in a scheme for copying the cartoons of Raphael in tapestry, and made drawings from them for that purpose. Houses were built and looms erected at the Mulberry Ground at Chelsea; but the contributions not being equal to the first expectations, the scheme was suddenly defeated, and Le Blond disappeared, to the no small dissatisfaction of those who were engaged with him. He died in an hospital at Paris in 1740. Le Blond explained his art in a book entitled II Colorito, published in 1730, and he was also the author of a treatise in French on Ideal Beauty, which was published in 1732, and has since been translated into English.