Plate LXXI.
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HENRI DE GUISE. Dumoustier. Musée Condé. | MARECHAL DE VIELVILLE. François Clouet. (Salting Collection). British Museum. |
To face page 246.
Yet another French picture at Chantilly of the Clouet School has to be recorded, the authorship of which is uncertain. It represents Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress of Henri IV, seated in her bath, with her infant sons (one being on the arm of his nurse) beside her. It is a composition which occurs frequently and seems to be rather meant for an allegory than for a portrait. Other versions of it are in the Louvre, at Doughty House Richmond, and in the Collections of Baron Pichon and the Viscomtesse de Zanzé. In this last example one of Gabrielle’s sisters is also introduced. She turns her back to the spectator, whilst Gabrielle herself—her bare neck adorned with a string of fine pearls—faces full round. At the Musée Condé (Cabinet des Gemmes) there is a miniature representing Gabrielle d’Estrées and her two Children, which bears unmistakable likeness to this portrait. The late M. Gruyer in his Catalogue Raisonnée of the Musée Condé justly points out that this composition testifies to the decadent turn taken by the late sixteenth-century French School; and we sadly miss the good taste and the refinement which are such marked qualities in the portraiture of François Clouet.
CHAPTER XVIII
FROM NICOLAS POUSSIN TO COROT
FRENCH seventeenth-century Art does not offer any such difficult problems as those presented to us by the portrait-painters who lived and laboured during the period of the Clouets, for the artists of this latter period in most cases were accustomed to sign their names to at least a certain number of their works, whereby they can be easily identified.