Simon Vouet
(January 9, 1590 - June 30, 1649) |
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Portraiture,Secular Narratives, Historical Narratives, Landscape, introduce the Italian Baroque style to France Art Work
| Name: |
Simon Vouet |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Paris, France |
| Nationality: |
French |
| Birth: |
January 9, 1590 |
| Death: |
June 30, 1649 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Portraiture,Secular Narratives, Historical Narratives, Landscape, introduce the Italian Baroque style to France |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Italian Baroque |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
| Considered the most influential French painter of his generation, Simon Vouet is credited with altering the direction of painting away from late mannerism and developing a new, decorative style based on, but not recapitulating, Italian models. Brilliant, facile, original, and elegant, Vouet's work remains too little appreciated. Although he was a product of his time, Vouet created some of the most appealing and sumptuous images of the French decorative age. He was capable of breathing life, energy, and elegance into even the driest allegory or history. Besides his seminal importance for France, the airy lightness of Vouet's figures and his lovely palette anticipate eighteenth-century Venetian developments, particularly the works of Piazzetta and Tiepolo. The student of his father, Laurent Vouet, Simon was reportedly in England at age fourteen, commissioned to paint a portrait of a lady. In 1611 Simon joined the French ambassador on a trip to Constantinople and thereafter to Italy, arriving in Venice by 1613 and Rome a year later. Retaining Rome as his home, Vouet traveled around Italy more than any other French artist, producing works in Genoa (1621-22), Naples (1620s), and learning from a wide variety of Italian masters. He visited Modena and Bologna, and in 1627 he was again in Venice. During Vouet's thirteen years in Rome, he was, together with Valentin, one of the foremost French Caravaggists. His Fortune Teller (Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada) and The Lovers (Rome, Pallavincini Collection) demonstrate Vouet's adaptation of Caravaggesque subjects and style. Vouet's first known public commission, the Birth of the Virgin (dated ca. 1620, Rome, San Francesco a Ripa), reveals his original adaptation of Caravaggism and his absorption of other artists as well. While the figures, composition, and gestures, as well as the dramatic lighting, reflect his knowledge of Caravaggio, the central head is derived from Michelangelo and the cloth-swathed head at the far right adapts one of Ter Brugghen's favorite devices. The year in which Vouet was elected "principal" of the Accademia di San Luca (1624), he also received a commission for an altarpiece depicting the Adoration of the True Cross for St. Peter's, which is now known only through a bozzetto. Caravaggism slowly declined in favor during the 1620s, and Vouet's work of those years shows his absorption of other styles. His St. Jerome and the Angel (dated to the early 1620s, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art) reflects Vouet's study of Lanfranco, while the styles of Guido Reni, the Carracci, Albani, and Domenichino crop up here and there and are the basis for Vouet's own development of a fully mature baroque style. That development can be traced in such works as Vouet's Temptation of St. Francis (done for San Lorenzo, Rome) and his Crucifixion (painted ca. 1621- 22, for Sant' Ambrogio, Genoa), as well as the Appearance of the Virgin to St. Bruno (dated ca. 1626, Naples, San Martino). Here a greater sentimentality, a diagonally moving composition, and idealized figure types point to the development of Vouet's mature style. In 1627 Vouet was recalled to Paris, named "premier painter to the King," and lodged in the Louvre. There he was one of the important forces altering the direction of French painting toward an elegant, classical, decorative manner. Helped by his Italian experience, Vouet was not simply reiterating Italian modes but formulating a new French style. Vouet did introduce the Italian studio system into France, training pupils in his methods, making it possible to execute large decorative programs effectively. His pupils included Eustache Le Sueur, Nicolas and Pierre Mignard, and Charles Le Bmn. Despite Vouet's importance to the development of later French painting, his French career is less easily traced than his Italian period. Many of Vouet's decorative works have been dismantled or destroyed, his altarpieces were removed by Napoleon, and other works were lost or relocated in museums. Vouet's early Parisian efforts mainly involved religious paintings, where his rather sober, yet sweet and dignified, manner was perfectly suited to the tastes of his patrons. His most celebrated religious work is The Presentation (dated 1641, commissioned by Richelieu for the high altar of the Novitiate of the Jesuits, now in the Louvre). Perhaps influenced by Philippe de Champaigne, the painting also owes a great debt to Titian for its setting, while many of the figure types reflect the full-bodied yet light and sensuous forms which he used to such fine effect in his decorative works. In fact, it is in the field of decorative works that Vouet is most admired. His most important decorative cycles were two for Anne of Austria at Fontainebleau (1644), for the Palais Royal (ca. 1643-47), and for the Hotel Seguier (ca. 1635-38), all of which are now destroyed but known through engravings by Dorigny. In these works Vouet revived illusionistic traditions developed in the sixteenth century but unused in the seventeenth. Based on paintings by Castiglione, Guercino, Veronese, and Guilio Romano, Vouet created various kinds of spatial illusions. Vouet's easel pictures of the period also demonstrate his successful new manner. His Toilet of Venus (dated late 1630s or early 1640s, Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art) is a marvelous fusion of immediacy, sensuality, and intellectual distance. The curvilinear movement which unifies the composition also removes the work from our world, making it comfortable for us to enjoy the brightly colored forms both as art and as mildly erotic play. A similar note and even more broadly conceived forms are struck by Vouet's Abundance (dated ca. 1640, Paris, Louvre). Vouet seems to have developed toward increasingly massive figures, enveloped by voluminous drapery and reminiscent of Pietro da Cortona, as his Allegory of Peace (dated ca. 1648, Chatsworth, Derbyshire) indicates. Poussin's short-lived career in Paris (1640-42) threatened to eclipse Vouet, prompting the King's remark: "There's Vouet nicely trapped." Poussin's departure cleared the way for Vouet's continued pre-eminence. However, since Richelieu and Louis XIII died in 1642 and 1643, respectively, Vouet's career did probably suffer some decline thereafter. Called the most important exponent of classicism after Poussin, Vouet employed an approach that was lighter, more delicate, and certainly more baroque. His influence rivaled that of Poussin because of Vouet's many pupils. Just shortly before his death, Vouet participated in the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1648. |
Samples of Work
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