JOUVENET, Jean-Baptiste, called Le Grand. - The best-known representative of a family of artists, b. at Rouen in 1644, d. at Paris in 1717. Having moved to Paris in 1661, he attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts as a pupil of the painter Le Brun, with whom, in 1673, he collaborated at Versailles on some decorations. In 1676 he obtained the chair of painting at the Academy, of which he became rector in 1707.

Stricken by a severe paralysis, he did not cease painting, and executed with his left hand alone, in 1713, the large canvases of the Magnificat for the choir of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. J. is considered among the greatest French painters of the end of the 17th century, and is certainly the most felicitous and imaginative composer of sacred subjects. Because of his Italianizing tendency, derived from his master's school and from the scrupulous study of the works of Poussin, he was called the Carracci of France, but he soon felt the influence of Rubens, as in the Crucifixion of 1697, now in the Louvre, and showed himself a painter endowed with a personal taste, especially in his later works, in which he revealed a very notable attention to nature, almost always studied from life.

Bibliography2 works

BIBL.: H. Vollmer, s. v. in Thieme-Becker, XIX, pp. 205-207; P. Lavedan, Histoire de l'art, Paris 1946, p. 465.

Eugenio Battisti

@incollection{ec7_jouvenet_jean_baptiste_detto_l, author = {Battisti, Eugenio}, title = {Jouvenet, jean-baptiste, detto le grand}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {VII}, pages = {597}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1951}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/jouvenet-jean-baptiste-detto-le-grand} }

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Jouvenet, Jean-Baptiste, called Le Grand

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