Everything about Jean Fouquet totally explained
Jean Fouquet or
Jehan Fouquet (
1420 -
1481) was the most important
French painter of the
15th century, a master of both panel painting and
manuscript illumination, and the apparent inventor of the
portrait miniature.
Life
Jean Fouquet was born in
Tours. Little is known of his life, but it's certain that he was in
Italy about
1437, where he executed a
portrait of
Pope Eugene IV (now surviving only in much later copies), and that upon his return to France, while retaining his purely French sentiment, he grafted the elements of the Tuscan style, which he'd acquired during his period in Italy, upon the style of the
Van Eycks, which was the basis of early 15th-century French art, and thus became the founder of an important new school. He was
court painter to
Louis XI.
Works
Also referred to as Souquet, Jean's supreme excellence as an
illuminator, the exquisite precision in the rendering of the finest detail, and his power of clear characterization in work on this minute scale, have long since procured him an eminent position in the art of his country; his importance as a painter was fully realized when his portraits and
altarpieces were for the first time brought together from various parts of Europe, at the exhibition of the "French Primitives" held at the
Bibliothèque Nationale in
Paris.
One of Fouquet's most important paintings is "Melun
diptych" (
c. 1450), formerly in
Melun cathedral. The depicts
Etienne Chevalier with his patron saint
St. Stephen (now in in
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) while the right wing shows a pale Virgin and Child surrounded by red and blue angels (
Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp). Since at least the seventeenth century, the Virgin has been recognized as a portrait of
Agnès Sorel. The
Louvre has his oil portraits of
Charles VII, of Count Wilczek, and of
Guillaume Jouvenal des Ursins, as well as a portrait drawing in
crayon; while an authentic portrait from his brush is in the Liechtenstein collection.
His self-portrait miniature would be the earliest sole self-portrait surviving in Western art, if the portrait in the
National Gallery, London by
Jan van Eyck were not in fact a self-portrait, as most art historians believe it to be.
Far more numerous are his illuminated books and
miniatures that have come down to us. The
Musée Condé in
Chantilly, Oise contains forty miniatures from a
Book of Hours, painted in
1461 for
Etienne Chevalier, already seen on the Berlin wing of the
Melun altarpiece. From Fouquet's hand again are eleven out of the fourteen miniatures illustrating a translation of
Josephus at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The second volume of this manuscript, unfortunately with only one of the original thirteen miniatures, was discovered and bought in 1903 by Mr
Henry Yates Thompson at a London sale, and restored by him to France.
Further Information
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