Didier-François d'Arclais de Montamy

Didier-François d'Arclais de Montamy was an eighteenth-century French civil servant, nature scholar and encyclopédiste, born in 1702 at Montamy and died on 8 February 1765. He was the son of Jean Joseph, sieur de Montamy d'Arclais, and Marie Françoise Guillard de La Madeleine, and he served as Grand Master of France for the duke of Orléans. His article credits him with a high scientific education alongside an interest in the fine arts. He translated from the German of Johann Heinrich Pott the Lithogéognosie ou Examen des pierres et des terres, published in Paris in two volumes in 1753, and he wrote the article on Chinese porcelain for volume seven of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie. His Traité des couleurs pour la peinture en émail et sur la porcelaine appeared in 1765 as a posthumous work published by Diderot. In 1762 he was made a Chevalier of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem.