NICOLAS FROMENT
Nicolas Froment, the painter of the diptych King René and his Second Wife, Jeanne de Laval (No. 304a), is frequently mentioned by those who have constituted themselves champions of a supposed important Early French national school. The few pictures with which he may be credited include the St. Siffrein, now in the Seminary at Avignon, the Raising of Lazarus, now in the Kaufmann collection at Berlin, and the Burning Bush, which includes the Portraits of King René and Jeanne de Laval, as the Donors who ordered the picture for the Cathedral at Aix, where it still is. But the Louvre diptych is an inferior work. Nothing is known about the dates of his birth and death. He flourished between 1460 and 1480, and was employed by good King René, who was himself a painter of some distinction, if contemporary chroniclers are to be believed. Froment died at Avignon, where he appears to have worked some considerable time, allowing his art to absorb those distinctly Italian tendencies which distinguished the productions of the Avignon school ever since Simone Martini had early in the fourteenth century worked in the Provençal city of the Popes.
A very typical instance of this Avignon school, with its blending of Northern realism and the noble sense of style of the early Italians, is the Pietà (No. 1001b). The group of the Virgin with the rigid body of Christ across her knees, St. John on the left and the Magdalen on the right, has a sculpturesque dignity and grandeur not to be found in the Northern art of that period. The Donor on the extreme left rather destroys the balance of the composition. The mourners and the landscape are silhouetted against a gold background. The picture was formerly in the Chartreuse of Villeneuve near Avignon, and was bought by the Société des Amis du Louvre for the great French national collection at the price of £4000. A well-known Spanish critic has claimed that this is one of the very rare works by the Spanish artist Bartolomé Bermejo.
Of the same school, but vastly inferior in conception and execution, is the much restored Christ rising from the Tomb, with a Donor and St. Agricola (No. 1001c). There are in Gallery X. (Salle Jean Fouquet) a few more anonymous fifteenth-century paintings, which need not here be discussed as they are of no real significance.