His father, Jacques François Joseph Swebach-Desfontaines, was a painter and porcelain designer. From 1814, he trained at the École des Beaux-Arts while assisting in his father's workshop.
Following the abdication of Napoleon, he went with his father to St.Petersburg, where Tsar Alexander I had invited him to direct the Imperial Porcelain Factory.[1]
In 1820, after their return to Paris, they established a joint workshop and produced what they called "four-handed paintings".[1]
He began exhibiting at the Salon under his own name in 1822, with a scene depicting the Hussars using a warehouse for a stable. He was praised for his technical abilities, but criticized for not having a style of his own.[1] After his father died the following year, he slowly developed his own style, based on British Romanticism. After 1838, he devoted himself primarily to lithography. A large collection of his works in that medium are kept at the Carnavalet Museum.[2]
Many of his early and transitional paintings are difficult to attribute accurately, as both he and his father signed their works with "Swebach", or not at all.[2]
