Life
Jean Fouquet was born in Tours. Little is known of his life, but it is certain that he was in Italy before 1447, where he executed a portrait of Pope Eugene IV who died in that year (the portrait survives only in much later copies). Upon his return to France, while retaining his purely French sentiment, he grafted the elements of the Tuscan style, which he had acquired during his period in Italy, upon the style of the Van Eycks, forming the basis of early 15th-century French art and becoming the founder of an important new school. He worked for the French court, including Charles VII, the treasurer Étienne Chevalier, and the chancellor Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins. Near the end of his career, he became court painter to Louis XI. His work can be associated with the French court's attempt to solidify French national identity in the wake of its long struggle with England in the Hundred Years' War.
Read more about this topic: Jean Fouquet
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
—Diane Arbus (1923–1971)
“Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“‘So passeth, in the passing of a day,
Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre,”
—Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599)