FOUQUET, JEAN

FOUQUET, JEAN. — French painter, b. at Tours in 1420, d. there in 1483. One of the most representative artists of the possibilities of French painting at the end of the Middle Ages. Trained in his homeland as a miniaturist, he also traveled to Italy and was in Rome where he painted a portrait of Pope Eugenius IV.
Upon his return to Paris he became court painter in the time of Louis XI. Portraitist and miniaturist, he composed what is considered his masterpiece in a series of miniatures for the famous Hours of Étienne Chevalier; forty of these miniatures are at Chantilly, others at the Louvre, and one in the British Museum in London. However, some of his panel portraits, such as that of Jouvenel des Ursins and the other of Charles VII, both at the Louvre, stand out for the formidable characterization of the figures achieved by his acute miniaturist means. Also splendid is the figure of Étienne Chevalier presented to the Virgin, which is in Berlin, a fragment of a diptych formerly at Melun, the other panel of which is in the Museum of Antwerp.