Works by Simon Vouet
59 works · 125 ms
Simon Vouet rose to prominence in Italy and was summoned back to France in 1627 as Louis XIII's Premier peintre du Roi, where he did much to bring the Italian Baroque into French painting.
He started out painting portraits: at 14 he went to England for a commission, and in 1611 he followed the Baron de Sancy, France's envoy to the Ottoman court, to Constantinople, again as a portraitist. He reached Venice in 1612 and Rome no later than 1614. In Italy he took in Caravaggio's lighting, Veronese's colour and the art of Guido Reni, and in 1624 the Accademia di San Luca elected him its president. In the modello for his altarpiece in St Peter's, from 1625, angels in red and lilac lean on clouds against a golden sky; the altarpiece was destroyed after 1725, and only fragments survive.
His wife Virginia da Vezzo, a painter he married in 1626, sat for his Madonnas and female saints. About 1627 he painted her as the Magdalen, a lidded jar in her hand and long plaits over her shoulder.
In Paris the king ordered portraits, tapestry cartoons and paintings for the Louvre, the Luxembourg and Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Louis XIII also asked for some thirty portrait drawings of his court in coloured chalks on light brown paper; in Cardinal Richelieu's, red chalk gives the cape and hat their colour, with pastel laid over it. His palette stayed bright: in Venus and Adonis, of about 1642, Adonis wears yellow-gold over a fuchsia tunic. Engravings by his sons-in-law Michel Dorigny and François Tortebat and by Claude Mellan record many works now lost.
Sources: Wikipedia, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum.
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