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Description: | A reproduction produced by the Vasari Society of a drawing by Jean Fouquet. The drawing is a portrait of a man with his head turned to the right. He is clean-shaven, and is wearing a close-fitted cap and a scarf knotted at the neck. There is some handwriting in the top right-hand corner of the drawing.
Text from the accompanying booklet produced by the Vasari Society:
"No. 25
JEAN FOUQUET
(b. about 1420; d. about 1483)
PORTRAIT OF A PAPAL LEGATE TO THE COURT OF FRANCE
Collection of Henry Oppenheimer, Esq. From the Heseltine Collection.
Silver-point. 19.8 x 13.4 cm. (7 13/16 x 5 1/4 in.).
This highly-finished drawing, executed, probably at Tours, early in the second half of the fifteenth century, is unequalled among the drawings of its time as a piece of masterly straightforward and convincing portraiture. It was exhibited by Mr. Heseltine at the Primitifs Exhibition at Paris is 1904 and was there ascribed to Jean Fouquet, partly on account of what was thought to be a characteristic skull-cap and doubtless still more because no other French artist of the period could be named with the requisite power and originality. This attribution has been generally accepted. The inscription is Ung Roumain legat de nostre (?) st pere en france. It was suggested by M. Henri Bouchot (L'Exposition des Primitifs français, Paris, 1904) that the legate in question was Teodoro Lelli (Bishop of Feltre 1462, of Treviso 1464, Cardinal 14645/5), who accompanied the Bishop of Ostia into France in 1464; but this was admittedly no more than a conjecture.
Fouquet excelled both as a portrait painter and as the illustrator and decorator of written books. It is in the latter capacity that he has won the most extensive fame, the forty leaves of Étienne Chevalier's prayer-book at Chantilly (other leaves at the Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the British Museum), the Boccaccio at Munich, the Josephus at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Grandes Chroniques de France in the same Library being his best-known productions. The miniatures in these manuscripts (except some that were obviously the work of his assistants) are wrought with an inventive realism combined with a beauty of colour and a sureness of touch that place their creator among the greatest artists of all time.
S. C. C."
Technique: REPRODUCTION
Reproduction by the Vasari Society of a drawing by Jean Fouquet, Portrait of a Papal Legate to the Court of France (1933.418). | Source: | Manchester City Galleries | Identifier: | mcag.emu.ecatalogue.105288 | Go to resource |
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