JOUVENET, JEAN-BAPTISTE, known as 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 on certain decorations at Versailles. In 1676 he obtained the chair of painting at the Academy, of which he became rector in 1707.
Stricken by severe paralysis, he did not cease painting, and in 1713 executed, with his left hand alone, the large canvases of the Magnificat for the Choir of Notre-Dame Cathedral. J. is considered among the greatest French painters of the late 17th century, and is certainly the most felicitous and imaginative composer of sacred subjects. Owing to his Italianizing tendency, derived from his master's school and from a scrupulous study of Poussin's works, 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 proved himself a painter endowed with personal taste, especially in his later works, in which he revealed a most remarkable attention to nature, almost always studied from life.