Vouet, Simon

(1590-1649)

   French artist born in Paris to a bourgeois family, his father a painter employed in the French court. In 1604, at 14, Vouet was called to England to render the portrait of a French lady and, in 1611, he accompanied the French Ambassador to Constantinople where he remained for a year painting portraits of Sultan Achmet I. These works are unfortunately lost. From Constantinople, he went to Venice in 1613, and in the following year to Rome where he supported himself financially through a pension from the French crown. Visits to Naples, Genoa, Modena, and Bologna gave him the opportunity to study the art in major Italian collections. In 1624, Vouet was elected president of the Accademia di San Luca, attesting to his success. The fact that many of his early paintings are lost has hindered the tracing of his artistic development and reconstruction of a reasonable chronology. Upon arrival in Rome, Vouet began experimenting with the Caravaggist mode of painting, with St. Jerome and the Angel of Judgment (c. 1625; Washington, National Gallery) and the Birth of the Virgin (c. 1620; Rome, San Francesco a Ripa) providing examples of this phase in his career. By the mid-1620s, the popularity of Caravaggism had waned and patrons demanded works in the more classicizing style of the Carracci. Vouet responded by eliminating the theatrical lighting and crude figure types of his Caravaggist phase and by replacing them with more elegant renditions. His Time Vanquished by Hope, Love, and Beauty (1627; Madrid, Prado) shows this change and in particular the influence of Guido Reni. Vouet was summoned back to France in 1627 and appointed Peintre du Roi (The King's Painter). At the Louvre, he established a school of painting where he trained the next generation of French masters, including Eustache Le Seur, Charles Lebrun, and Pierre Mignard. His studio became the locus of dissemination of the official artistic ideology of the French monarchs —Louis XIII, his wife Anne of Austria, and mother Marie de' Medici. Many of the large decorative programs Vouet carried out in Paris were destroyed. Of his surviving works, the Allegory of Wealth (c. 1630-1635; Paris, Louvre), believed to have been painted for Louis XIII'S principal residence, St. Germain-en-Laye, and the Presentation (1641; Paris, Louvre), painted for the high altar of the Novitiate Church of the Jesuits in Paris and commissioned by Cardinal Armand Richelieu, are among the most notable examples. Vouet is credited with bringing the classicizing Italian style of painting to France and therefore changing the course of art in the region.