J. B. Huet was the son of a decorative artist, and grew up in the Louvre, so at an early age he knew such artists as F. Boucher and J.-B. Le Prince, both of whom influenced his work in their own way. However, his actual teacher was the animal painter Dagomer.
Huet made his own contribution to the artistic style of his time with pastorals, animal pictures, and ornaments in drawings, paintings, and graphics, not least because his pictorial ideas were taken up and disseminated by various branches of craftsmanship - tapestry manufactories, weavers, and cabinetmakers.
Huet owed his special reputation to his depictions of animals. In them he freed himself from such major precursors as Oudry and Desportes in that he depicted the animals in their actual physical condition and with their individual physiognomic expressions. Thus he was accepted into the Paris Academy in 1769 with a picture, reminiscent of older Netherlandish painting, of a dog lunging after fowl (Louvre).
It was both one of Huet's artistic aims and appropriate to the taste of the time that beginning in roughly 1770 he transferred a large number of his sheets into prints (etchings) or had them reproduced by others, either one of his sons or, especially, G. Demarteau. Intending some of them as teaching materials, he then published individual series as 'cahiers' or 'livres'.
This also explains why Huet, like many of his contemporaries, always exhibited drawings along with his paintings in the Salons, to which he regularly submitted abundant material.
