COURTOIS, JACQUES, known as LE BOURGUIGNON. — Painter and engraver, born on 12 Feb. 1621 at St-Hippolyte in Franche-Comté and died in Rome on 14 Nov. 1675. A pupil of his father, the painter Jean-Pierre C., he came to Italy as an adolescent (1636) and, in Milan, enlisted in the Spanish army without, however, abandoning painting.
After leaving the military and going to Bologna, he worked in the studio of a landscape painter from Lorraine, a certain Jérôme, where he met Guido Reni and Albani, following their example and setting out to become a painter of religious subjects. But after passing through Florence and Siena, around 1640 he moved to Rome, where the friendship of Pieter van Laer, known as Bamboccio, Michelangelo Cerquozzi and Pietro da Cortona—whom he met while painting in the refectory of the convent of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, where he had been housed upon his arrival—led him back to his true path, that of a battle painter, executed with “French fury” using the many sketches taken from life during his military service. In Rome, around 1647, he married a Maria Vaiani, but serious conflicts embittered his life and drove him from home. He was again in Florence and Siena (1652 and 1654–55) in the service of Mattias de’ Medici. After a brief return to his homeland in early 1655, he painted, together with his brother Gianfrancesco, some pictures for the convent of the Ursulines in Fribourg, where two of his sisters were nuns. Returning to Italy, he passed through Bergamo and Venice, perhaps went to Padua, and through Siena and Florence returned to Rome, where on 13 Dec. 1657 he entered as a temporal coadjutor among the Jesuits of S. Andrea al Quirinale, and there pronounced his final vows on 2 Feb. 1668.
Meanwhile he continued to paint. In 1658, together with his brother Guglielmo, he began the decoration of the chapel of the Prima Maria Congregation at the Collegio Romano, which may be considered his finest religious work and which still shows his predilection for agitated battle scenes. Some pictures, now lost, he painted for the refectory of the professed house at the Gesù, others for the novitiate of S. Andrea al Quirinale, and in his last years he worked on preparing designs for a work he intended to paint in the tribune of the Gesù. Then he is found in Genoa; in Lent 1675 he was in Pisa, then in Florence, where he left his self-portrait to Grand Duke Cosimo III, and then, returning to Rome, death overtook him suddenly.
It has already been noted how C. sometimes availed himself of the collaboration of his brothers, who were also painters: Guglielmo, born at St-Hippolyte in 1628 and died in Rome on 15 June 1675, had been a pupil of Pietro da Cortona and left various engravings as well as paintings in the Roman churches of S. Marco, S. Giovanni in Laterano, S. Passede, S. Lorenzo in Lucina and some others; Gian Francesco (and not Giambattista, as has often been repeated) was a Capuchin in a Roman convent and painted chiefly religious pictures for the houses of his Order.