Sir Nicolas Dorigny, a French engraver, was the youngest son of Michel Dorigny, and was born in Paris in 1658. He was brought up to the bar, and followed that profession until he was thirty years of age, when, in consequence of deafness, he turned his thoughts to the arts, and visited Italy, where he remained twenty-eight years. His first plates were executed with the point; and if we were to judge of his talent by his early prints, his reputation would be very short of that which he acquired by a union of the point and the graver in his later productions. He took for his model the admirable works of Gérard Audran; and although he by no means equalled that celebrated artist, either in the style of his drawing, or in the picturesque effect of his light and shade, his prints will always be esteemed both for their merit as engravings and for the importance of the subjects of which he made choice. In 1711 he was invited to England by Queen Anne to engrave the Cartoons of Raphael at Hampton Court, which he finished in 1719, and in the following year he was knighted by King George I. While he was in England he painted some portraits of the nobility, but with no great success. He returned to France in 1725, and was received into the Academy in the same year. He exhibited some pictures of sacred subjects at the Salon from 1739 to 1743, and died in Paris in 1746.
The following are his principal prints:
This article incorporates text from the article "DORIGNY, Sir Nicholas" in Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers by Michael Bryan, edited by Robert Edmund Graves and Sir Walter Armstrong, an 1886–1889 publication now in the public domain.