FOUQUET, JEAN

FOUQUET, JEAN. - French painter, b. at Tours in 1420, d. there in 1483. One of the artists most representative of the taste and potential of French painting at the end of the Middle Ages. Trained in his native country as a miniaturist, he also travelled in Italy and was in Rome, where he painted a portrait of Pope Eugenio IV.
Having returned to Paris, he became court painter in the time of Luigi XI. A portraitist and miniaturist, he produced what is considered his masterpiece in a series of miniatures for the celebrated Libro d'oro of Stefano Chevalier; forty of these miniatures are at Chantilly, others at the Louvre, and one in the British Museum in London. Some of his panel portraits, however, such as that of Jouvenel des Ursin and that of Carlo VII, both at the Louvre, are striking for the formidable characterization of their subjects, achieved through his acute miniaturist means. Also most beautiful is the figure of Stefano Chevalier presented to the Virgin, now in Berlin, a fragment of a diptych formerly at Melun, whose other panel is in the Museum of Antwerp.