eldest son of Johan Ludwig (b. c.1740), an émigré miniature painter from Hanover who took the name of John Lewis; brother of bookbinder Charles Lewis (1786–1836) and the landscape painter George Robert Lewis (1782–1871); father of the orientalist painter John Frederick (Spanish) Lewis (1804–1876); apprenticed about 1794 to engraver J C Stadler, who taught him aquatinting; entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1797 and left about 1802; first major printmaking project was the aquatinting of Thomas Girtin's Twenty of the most Picturesque Views in Paris and its Environs, published in 1803.