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 toVenicein 1613, and in the following year toRomewhere he supported himself financially through a pension from the French crown.Visits to Naples, Genoa, Modena, andBolognagave him the opportunity to study the art in major Italian collections. In 1624, Vouet was elected president of theAccademia 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 theCaravaggistmode of painting, withSt.Jeromeand the Angel of Judgment(c. 1625; Washington, National Gallery) and theBirth of theVirgin(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 moreclassicizingstyle of theCarracci. Vouet responded by eliminating the theatrical lighting and crude figure types of his Caravaggist phase and by replacing them with more elegant renditions. HisTime Vanquished by Hope,Love,and Beauty(1627; Madrid, Prado) shows this change and in particular the influence ofGuido 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, includingEustache 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 motherMarie de' Medici. Many of the large decorative programs Vouet carried out in Paris were destroyed. Of his surviving works, theAllegory of Wealth(c. 1630-1635; Paris, Louvre), believed to have been painted for Louis XIII'S principal residence, St. Germain-en-Laye, and thePresentation(1641; Paris, Louvre), painted for the high altar of the Novitiate Church of theJesuitsin Paris and commissioned by CardinalArmand 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.