Simon Vouet

Bio

The son of Laurent Vouet, a little-known painter often employed in the service of the Crown, Simon Vouet seems to have been highly precocious and first travelled to England at the age of fourteen, to execute a portrait commission. He then embarked upon a more extensive tour, first going to Constantinople, and from there on to Venice and Rome, where he remained (with brief trips to Genoa and Milan) from 1614 to 1627. During his thirteen years in Rome he became, with Valentin, the leading French exponent of the Caravaggesque style, as exemplified by his Fortune Teller now in Ottawa and the Birth of the Virgin for San Francesco a Ripa, perhaps his first major public commission in Rome.

Like his contemporaries, Valentin, Regnier and Tournier, Vouet was immediately attracted by the radical example of Caravaggio and his Roman pictures, represent the very best of French Caravaggism. Although the Italian painter had died some four years before Vouet’s arrival in Rome, Caravggio remained the dominant influence not only on most Italian and French painters (with the notable exception of Poussin), but also on a succession of northern artists who studied in Rome. By the time Vouet was elected Principe (or head) of the Academy of Saint Luke in 1624 his palette had begun to lighten, his forms becoming more elegant and decorative, and the Caravaggesque influence less immediate Although this development was progressive, first dawning in the Calvary of 1621 (Genoa, Church of the Gesu), a more visible change may be observed in the Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist of 1626 (San Francisco, Museum of Fine Arts).

Vouet was recalled with some fanfare to France in 1627 and named Premier Peintre du Roi, not yet an official post but a notable distinction. Charged with the decoration of royal palaces and projects for the Crown, including designing for the Gobelin and Beauvais tapestry manufactories, he established the largest and most significant studio in Paris. Many of the leading painters of the next generation began their careers under his tutelage, notably LeBrun, Mignard and LeSueur. Each learned to execute studio commissions in the new style Vouet had evolved during his Italian sojourn, and which was perfectly suited to large decorative schemes yet flexible enough to accommodate small devotional works:. The exaggerated chiaroscuro of Caravaggio was progressively replaced by Venetian and Bolognese influences, as Vouet’s palette became lighter and more vivid, his sense of form more seductive. Not only was Vouet patronized by the King and Queen but, in 1630, he began the decoration of the gallery and chapel of Cardinal Richelieu’s Parisian Palace as well as the chapel of his the powerful prelate’s country estate at Rueil, later working for a succession of those new men who had made their fortunes during or after the wars of the Fronde.

By the early 1630s Vouet’s studio had expanded, with the addition over the next decade of his brother Aubin and an increasing number of talented pupils, including Laurent de Ia Hyre, Charles Poerson, Michel Corneille, Francois Perrier, Nicholas Chaperon, Michel Dorigny, and Claude Mellan. From 1636-1640 he was engaged in the task of decorating the gallery of the King’s favorite palace of Saint Germain (both the old and new buildings) of which the Allegory of Charity and Allegory of Riches (Paris, Louvre), are particularly notable examples, while providing a series of pictures for the chapels of both chateaux, in which the Trinity (now Monuments Nationaux, formerly Stair Sainty Matthiesen Inc) was placed above Poussin’s Eucharist. He also began his splendid decorations for the Hôtel Seguier, the magnificent residence of the enormously wealthy Chancellor of France, and a further series in the Hôtel Lambert, now the Paris residence of Baron Guy de Rothschild. Among the works produced for the former was the emotive and dramatic Christ on the Cross (now Lyon, Musée des Beaux Arts) is the most spectacular.

After returning to work in what was now the Palais Royal (formerly Richelieu’s Palace) for the dowager Queen Regent from 1644-45, he received a commission to decorate the Hotel Bretonvilliers, producing in 1646 one of his last great classical subjects, Saturn, conquered by Cupid, Venus and Hope (Bourges, Musée du Berry). The recent Vouet exhibition (held at the Grand Palais in Paris in the winter of 1990-91), culminated with a splendid altar-piece produced for the Church of Saint-Mederic, The Adoration of the Divine Name by Four Saints. Although dated by Crelly to the mid’1630’s, this work is more convincingly dated by the authors of the exhibition catalogue to the years 1645-49, demonstrating that even towards the end of his life Vouet could create a brilliant and inspirational masterpiece. In addition to the complex and elaborate multi figure compositions that Vouet produced throughout his career, he also painted a series of charming and sensitive representations of the Madonna and Child on a more modest scale. Their popularity may be attested to by their continued publication as engravings some years after the artist’s death (one, by Jean Boulanger, as late as 1661). These were also extensively imitated or copied by other artists, most competently by his pupils Dorigny and Mellan, who remained faithful to his artistic legacy throughout their subsequent careers. [1]

Sadly, his important French work is less well-known and conserved than that of his Roman period. Many of his large decorative schemes have been destroyed and few of his Church paintings, many of which were removed during the Revolution, are remain in situ. Still, Enough of the great works survive, however, such as the Presentation in the Temple, painted for the high altar of the Jesuit Maison Professe, St Paul-St Louis, and now in the Louvre, for us to see enjoy the ample form, lively sense of colour and inventiveness of design which that justly earned him the reputation of having restored the prestige of the native school among French collectors.

In 1648, shortly before his death, he helped found the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which under LeBrun’s directorate carried on many of the principles which Vouet’s work had introduced. Ultimately Vouet’s reputation was dwarfed by that of Poussin and it was the latter whose influence was more significant on succeeding generations.