Plate LV.
MONSIEUR DE NEVERS. DUC DE GUISE.
Musée Condé. Jean Clouet.
The likeness of Francis I at Hampton Court, though painted by some mediocre copyist, has a special interest, inasmuch as it once belonged to Henry VIII of England. This portrait is reproduced in pencil in the Recueil d’Arras, and another, though superior, presentation of this same King in the Tribune at Chantilly seems to be of the same type. The King is here shown in profile, a treatment copied repeatedly by Limousin, an example being in the Gallerie d’Apollon at the Louvre, where he is seen kneeling beside Queen Claude. The latest portrait of all of this monarch is a drawing at Chantilly taken full face, which seems to have been made as a post-mortem effigy, such as, according to the Royal Accounts, François Clouet was commissioned to make. This again is only a copy; so that of these many and varied types of portrait few only can claim to be the original work of Jean Clouet. In this connection we should like to mention an exquisite drawing recently acquired by the British Museum which represents Marguerite d’Angoulême, sister of King Francis, in the bloom of her youth.[96]
Portraits of Queen Claude[97] are as rare as those of her royal husband are numerous. There is a slight drawing at Chantilly representing the daughter of Louis XII: presumably taken soon after her marriage to the heir to the French throne (which under the Salic Law she could not ascend herself). This marriage took place after the death of her mother, Anne de Bretagne, whose dearest wish it had been that she should marry Charles V, a suitor to whom she had been affianced in infancy. According to Brantôme the shrewd Queen Anne foresaw that her timid little daughter could not have a particularly happy life between so fickle a husband as Francis and so ambitious a mother-in-law as Louise of Savoy; but King Louis thought otherwise and sacrificed his daughter to his patriotism. This drawing, albeit very slight, is not without considerable charm. It dates probably from the same period as the portrait of the young King at Chantilly and may perhaps be attributed to the same artist. It is nothing like so elaborately finished as the drawing of Queen Claude’s sister Renée, which in craftsmanship recalls the drawing of Duc Claude de Guise in the Musée Condé. Another far more finished and far more elaborate drawing, now in Florence, represents Queen Claude some ten years later as Queen-Mother; and it bears upon it marginal notes in no less august a hand than that of Catherine de Medicis herself, which enhances its importance. Apparently this too is a copy of one of Jean Clouet’s lost originals.