JEAN FOUQUET
Of far greater importance is the school which flourished at Tours, for here at last we meet with clearly marked personalities whose names are definitely connected with extant works, even if the character of their art remains essentially Flemish. The best known artist of this group is Jean Fouquet (c. 1425–1480?), who was Painter to Charles vii. and Louis xi. and wrought the wonderful miniatures in the famous Book of Hours at Chantilly. He was distinctly more successful as an illuminator than as a painter, although his masterpiece, the Chevalier diptych (of which one wing is at the Antwerp and the other at the Berlin Museum), is a work of considerable merit. The Louvre owns an interesting painting from his brush—the portrait of the corpulent Chancellor of France, Guillaume Juvénal des Ursins, Baron de Trainel (No. 288). He is depicted in three-quarter profile to the right, dressed in a fur-edged red robe, with hands folded in prayer, before an open book on a cushion. The pilasters in the rich architectural setting terminate in two bears supporting the Chancellor’s coat of arms. This important picture was bought in 1835 for the sum of £36. It was then attributed to Michael Wohlgemuth!
Fouquet is known to have painted Charles vii. in 1444; but the Portrait of Charles VII., King of France (No. 289), with the inscription along the top, “le très glorieux roy de france,” and below, “charles septiesme de ce nom,” cannot certainly be identified with the picture referred to in contemporary records. The Louvre picture was acquired in 1838 for £18.
The name of Jean Fouquet has for a long time been connected with the admirable little portrait known as The Man with the Wineglass (No. 1000, formerly No. 1000a). It was shown as a work of Fouquet at the Exhibition of French Primitives; and the attribution is still maintained by many French critics, although in the official Catalogue the picture is given to an Unknown French painter of the fifteenth century known as “The Master of 1456” from a dated picture in the Liechtenstein Gallery in Vienna. The whole style of the painting would, however, point to German origin, the only thing French about the picture being the type of the personage represented. It is interesting to note that this portrait, which was bought from a Paris dealer in 1906 for £7600, was formerly in the collection of Count Wilczek in Vienna, and was bought by its former owner at Ulm. It is probably the work of a painter of the Swabian school.
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.