Jean Fouquet - Works

Works

Jean's excellence as an illuminator, his precision in the rendering of the finest detail, and his power of clear characterization in work on this minute scale, have procured him an eminent position in the art of his country. His importance as a painter was fully realized when his portraits and altarpieces were for the first time brought together from various parts of Europe at the exhibition of the "French Primitives" held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

One of Fouquet's most important paintings is the Melun Diptych (c. 1450), formerly in Melun cathedral. The left wing of the diptych depicts Étienne Chevalier with his patron saint St. Stephen (now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) while the right wing shows a pale Virgin and Child surrounded by red and blue angels (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp). Since at least the seventeenth century, the Virgin has been recognized as a portrait of Agnès Sorel. The Louvre has his oil portraits of Charles VII, of Count Wilczek, and of Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins, and a portrait drawing in crayon.

His self-portrait miniature is likely the earliest sole self-portrait surviving in Western art, if the 1433 portrait by Jan van Eyck—usually called Portrait of a Man or Portrait of a Man in a Turban—is not in fact a self-portrait, as most art historians believe it to be.

Far more numerous are his illuminated books and miniatures. The Musée Condé in Chantilly, Oise contains forty miniatures from the Hours of Étienne Chevalier, painted in 1461 for Chevalier. Fouquet also illuminated a copy of the Grandes Chroniques de France, for an unknown patron, either Charles VII or someone else at the royal court. Also from Fouquet's hand are eleven of the fourteen miniatures illustrating a translation of Josephus at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The second volume of this manuscript, unfortunately with only one of the original thirteen miniatures, was discovered and bought in 1903 by Henry Yates Thompson at a London sale, and restored by him to France.