Working stealthily on his own, Lequeu produced lifelike self-portraits, plans for revolutionary monuments, erotic drawings, and over one hundred designs for imagined projects. His drawings exhibit an exceptional range of skill and creativity, and an inventiveness motivated by antiquity and the Enlightenment.
Jennifer Tonkovich, of the Morgan Library and Museum, said during the press presentation of the exhibition: “Jean-Jacques Lequeu was a builder of fantasies, an architect that we know through his drawings, not his buildings. Since many of his drawings were not proposals for actual buildings, we see his imagination unleashed. The more closely visitors look, the more details will emerge. Two hundred years after they were made, they convey to us the possibilities of architecture and the built environment.” – GM