François Clouet (School of)

Portrait of Henry II, King of France

Panel - 18.5 x 14 cm

Portraits

Provenance:

• Comte de Beaupré collection, Nancy,

• private collection.

The taste for individual portraits, painted from life or copied, appeared in the middle of the 14th century in Europe...

Provenance:

• Comte de Beaupré collection, Nancy,

• private collection.

The taste for individual portraits, painted from life or copied, appeared in the middle of the 14th century in Europe and continued to increase during the following centuries. In France, this trend was justly represented by the Fouquets. Jean Fouquet, responsible for the Portrait of Charles VII kept at the Louvre, was also the first artist to provide a model for royal portraiture.

Henri II (1519-1559) reigned from 1547 to 1559. He was the son of Francis I and Claude of France, and married Catherine de Medici in 1533. He pursued his father’s policies and joined forces with the German protestant princes to weaken the power of his Spanish rival, Charles V. Under his reign, the Guises played a leading role. To fight against the advance of Calvinism, he signed the Edict of Ecouen (1559), whereby heretics faced the death penalty. At court, he favoured the literary and artistic Renaissance. His mistress, Diane de Poitiers, for whom he built the Château d’Anet, had a strong influence over him. He died from an injury he suffered during a tournament.

When Francis I ascended to the throne, the tradition of the court portrait was still in its infancy. Sovereigns now felt the urgent need to finally establish a royal iconography, which was defined by Jean Clouet. The father of François, he established codes and models for royal portraits. From this point onwards, this new genre became a speciality in France; our Portrait of Henry II is indeed a fine example of this genre. Under his reign, the notion of individualism introduced through humanism and Protestantism, significantly developed the fashion of portrait painting. The clothing is more sober in order to better define the face and the expression. Here, and just like the life-size version in the Uffizi in Florence, the king is dressed in a black and gold doublet. He is wearing the chain of the Order of Saint Michael and is wearing a hat with feathers. The broad white collar embroidered with gold emphasises his beard and enhances his face’s complexion.

Here, François Clouet uses the precepts acquired in his father’s studio, while cultivating his own style. He combines the elegance of his stroke, the refinement of the rendering, the sense of hieratic deportment, tempered by the face’s curves, with the intensity of the expression. The most singular aspect of his manner of painting is the distance he manages to maintain between the universe of his characters and that of the viewer. These pictorial characteristics are indubitably present in our portrait.

More informations

around 1516 Tours - Paris 1572

François Clouet was trained in the workshop of his father, the painter and draughtsman Jean Clouet (around 1485-1540) who had left Brussels to become, first in Tours around 1516, and later in Paris in 1529, a valet to the King of France. Highly fashionable at the court of the Valois, Jean Clouet presided over the birth of the autonomous portrait, either drawn or painted, combining minute detail and the exquisite brushwork typical of the Flemish, with a precise representation of the subject and a refinement of line according to the French taste. He developed the genre in a style which became the most significant expression of the French Renaissance and the incipient mannerism.
François Clouet succeeded his father in 1540 becoming the painter for four kings, François I, Henri II, François II and Charles IX. He probably travelled in Italy around 1549-1550 where he would have had the opportunity to study the portraits of Bronzino. Like his father, whose manner he adopted, he produced numerous portraits in three colours of chalk, or paint, which made him the most sought-after painter in the court. His portraits, which display a great respect for his models, exude a delight in veracity and realism, at the same time as an attachment to precise definition of the contours. His portraits in bust have a hieratic aspect, and are characterised by the minute detail of the costumes and the severity of the faces. François Clouet was also the creator of the new type of full-length portrait.
The Clouets had numerous collaborators, students or followers, who are gradually being identified through the study of archives and the drawing collections of the royal family and entourage, such as J. de Court, Dumontier, Caron, Deval, or Quesnel, not to mention the many anonymous artists generally given provisional designations.
The tradition established by the Clouets who, together with their imitators, ‘recorded’ all of the important figures of their era, would be sustained up until the middle of the seventeenth century and the advent of the decorative portraits that were appreciated by the court of Louis XIV.