Le Brun
Le Brun, Charles
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Supervised state artistic production in second half of seventeenth-century France
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
24 February 1619, Paris, France
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
12 February 1690, Paris, France. Aged 71
DISCIPLINE:
Painter and designer
FIELD:
Art and design
LANGUAGE:
French
PARENTS:
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SIBLINGS:
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SPOUSE:
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CHILDREN:
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EDUCATION:
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MAJOR WORK:
LIFE AND TIMES:
Le Brun was the protegee of the Chancellor, Pierre Seguier and studied in the studios of the painters Guillaume Perrier and Simon Vouet. While still with Vouet, he produced a large historical painting, “Hercules and the Horses of Diomedes”, which demonstrated a skill in composition and handling that was unusual in such a young artists.
In 1642, Le Brun went to study in Rome worked for four years, part of the time with Nicolas Poussin and also studying contemporary Roman baroque art. He returned to Paris in 1646 and immediately received commissions for decorative and religious paintings. In 1650 he painting the ceiling at the Hotel Lambert in Paris.
It was a huge project which was the most comprehensive illusionist baroque décor of the time in France. This project, together with a commissions to decorate the magnificient chateau at Vaux-le-Vicomte for Fouquet* established Le Brun’s reputation.
In 1661 he painted a large equestrian portrait of Seguier. In the same year, Le Brun received his first commission from the king, Louis XIV*. “The Family of Darius before Alexander” was a historical painting executed in Le Brun’s mature style in which the classical influence from Poussin* was combined with more fluid composition and less heroic ambience.
In 1663 Le Brun began decorating the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre. He assembled a team of workers to execute the decorative mix of stucco, arabesque and painted figures, and used the skills he had shown at Vaux in organizing his workers. The king liked the picture of Alexander which by linking him with the great general was a good piece of royal propaganda, and Le Brun was commissioned to do a four large paintings illustrating the victories of Alexander.
In 1663, he was appointed director of the Gobelins factory by Colbert* who had succeeded Fouquet as finance minister. At Gobelins, Le Brun was responsible for hundreds of painters, sculptors, weavers, dyers, engravers, goldsmiths and marble workers.
Together, he and Colbert imposed a universal standard on the arts in France and Le Brun became the virtual dictator of French artistic execution and production. His style of classicism combined with a moderated form of Roman baroque perfectly suited the desire of Colbert and the king to use art to promote national unity and the glory of France and the French monarchy.
In the quarrel between supporters of the ancients and the modernists, Charles Perrault* cited Le Brun as the example of a modern artist who had surpassed the ancients. Le Brun’s forte was his impressive power of organization, and his ability to manage large teams of workers. He was equally skilled in designing paintings, garden sculpture, tapestries and schemes of decoration, and he supervised every stage of production
In 1663 he was also appointed the director of the French Academy of Painting which he and Colbert completely reorganized. Le Brun wrote a treatise which amounted to a doctrine of style that every student was expected to follow. He set out exact instructions on how to represent specific emotions and even included diagrams to illustrate his point. He recommended the artists that made suitable subjects for study, lauding the ancients, Raphael* and Poussin, and warning against the Venetians, who Le Brun thought were too free with colour, and the Dutch and Flemish, who he thought were not discriminating enough in their imitation of nature. Le Brun’s own work was less rigidly classical than in his theories.
He was the supreme arbiter of artistic taste: every post of artistic importance was vetted by him and he was commissioned on all the big schemes in the royal palaces. In 1665, with the help of Charles Perrault, he and not the Italian Bernini*, was given the job of designing a new Louvre.
Between 1671 and ‘81, the appartments of the king and queen at Versailles were decorated under his supervision. He used the same combination of stucco and paint and also incorporated illusionist panels, for example in the “salle des gardes de la reine” where groups of spectators look down into the room from behind painted balustrades (a device which had first been used in the Villa Maser by Paolo Veronese*).
The decoration of the walls in the rooms at Versailles often varied from the traditional method based on painted panelling which Le Brun had used at Vaux and in the Louvre. In some rooms, the walls were covered with patterned velvet and in others he used panels of different coloured marble.
Many of the decorations celebrated the martial achievements of the king or otherwise glorified him. On the ceiling of the “galerie des glaces” and in the “salon de la guerre”, the king was featured as a Roman emperor.
In 1675 Le Brun was made President of the Academy of St Luke in Rome which was the highest artistic order in that city. When Colbert was succeeded by Francois de Tellier Louvois in 1683, Le Brun did not get the important commissions although he was still in favour with the king.
In the remaining years of his life, he painted relatively small pictures such as the “Adoration of the Shepherds” (c1689) which reveals a lyrical quality and an empathy his larger official pictures lacked.
ASSESSMENT: He became the most influential artist of his time, and with the backing of the king and his chief minister, imposed a uniform taste in French artistic production.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: He collaborated with Moliere*
His style rivalled that of Puget*
ONELINER: Charles Le Brun, dictator of artistic taste in 17th century France
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Blunt, Anthony, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 1980