1699-1779 French Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin Locations Chardin was born in Paris, the son of a cabinetmaker, and rarely left the city. He lived on the Left Bank near Saint-Sulpice until 1757, when Louis XV granted him a studio and living quarters in the Louvre. Chardin entered into a marriage contract with Marguerite Saintard in 1723, whom he did not marry until 1731. He served apprenticeships with the history painters Pierre-Jacques Cazes and Noël-Nicholas Coypel, and in 1724 became a master in the Acad??mie de Saint-Luc. Upon presentation of The Ray in 1728, he was admitted to the Acad??mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. The following year he ceded his position in the Acad??mie de Saint-Luc. In November of 1731 his son Jean-Pierre was baptized, and a daughter, Marguerite-Agn??s, was baptized in 1733. In 1735 his wife Marguerite died, and within two years Marguerite-Agn??s had died as well. The Ray, 1728, Mus??e du Louvre, Paris.Beginning in 1737 Chardin exhibited regularly at the Salon. He would prove to be a dedicated academician, regularly attending meetings for fifty years, and functioning successively as counsellor, treasurer, and secretary, overseeing in 1761 the installation of Salon exhibitions. In 1744 he entered his second marriage, this time to Françoise-Marguerite Pouget. The following year a daughter, Ang??lique-Françoise, was born, but she died in 1746. In 1752 Chardin was granted a pension of 500 livres by Louis XV. At the Salon of 1759 he exhibited nine paintings; it was the first Salon to be commented upon by Denis Diderot, who would prove to be a great admirer and public champion of Chardin work. Beginning in 1761, his responsibilities on behalf of the Salon, simultaneously arranging the exhibitions and acting as treasurer, resulted in a diminution of productivity in painting, and the showing of replicas of previous works. In 1763 his services to the Acad??mie were acknowledged with an extra 200 livres in pension. In 1765 he was unanimously elected associate member of the Acad??mie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts of Rouen, but there is no evidence that he left Paris to accept the honor.[8] By 1770 Chardin was the Premiere peintre du roi, and his pension of 1,400 livres was the highest in the Academy. In 1772 Chardin son, also a painter, drowned in Venice, a probable suicide. The artist last known oil painting was dated 1776; his final Salon participation was in 1779, and featured several pastel studies. Gravely ill by November of that year, he died in Paris on December 6, at the age of 80.  Related Paintings of Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin :. | PLAYING gyro juvenile | The Grace | Pomegranate Grape glass knife | Style life with Brioche | The silver goblet |
Related Artists:
Aleksei Matveev

Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio
was an Italian painter of the High Renaissance from Lombardy, who worked in the studio of Leonardo da Vinci.[2] Boltraffio and Bernardino Luini are the strongest artistic personalities to emerge from Leonardo's studio. According to Giorgio Vasari, he was of an aristocratic family and was born in Milan. His major painting of the 1490s is the Resurrection (painted with fellow da Vinci pupil Marco d'Oggiono and now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). A Madonna and Child in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli of Milan, is one of the high points of the Lombard Quattrocento. His portraits, often in profile, and his half-length renderings of the Madonna and Child are Leonardesque in conception, though the clean hard edges of his outlines lack Leonardo's sfumato. In Bologna, where he remained in 1500-1502, he found sympathetic patrons in the Casio family, of whom he painted several portraits and for whom he produced his masterwork, the Pala Casio for the Church of the Misericordia (Louvre Museum); it depicts a Madonna and Child with John the Baptist and Saint Sebastian and two Kneeling Donors, Giacomo Marchione de' Pandolfi da Casio and his son, the Bolognese poet Girolamo Casio[3], who mentioned Boltraffio in some of his sonnets. Boltraffio's portrait of Girolamo Casio is at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.
Francois Clouet
1510-1572 French Francois Clouet Locations The earliest reference to him is a document dated December 1541 (see Jean Clouet), in which the king renounces for the benefit of François his father estate, which had escheated to the crown as the estate of a foreigner. In this document, the younger Clouet is said to have followed his father very closely in his art. Like his father, he held the office of groom of the chamber and painter in ordinary to the king, and so far as salary is concerned, he started where his father left off. Many drawings are attributed to this artist, often without perfect certainty. There is, however, more to go upon than there is in the case of his father. As the praises of Francois Clouet were sung by the writers of the day, his name was carefully preserved from reign to reign, and there is an ancient and unbroken tradition in the attribution of many of his pictures. There are not, however, any original attestations of his works, nor are any documents known which would guarantee the ascriptions usually accepted. To him are attributed the portraits of Francis I at the Uffizi and at the Louvre, and various drawings relating to them. He probably also painted the portrait of Catherine de Medici at Versailles and other works, and in all probability a large number of the drawings ascribed to him were from his hand. One of his most remarkable portraits is that of Mary, queen of Scots, a drawing in chalks in the Bibliotheque Nationale, and of similar character are the two portraits of Charles IX and the one at Chantilly of Marguerite of France. Perhaps his masterpiece is the portrait of Elizabeth of Austria in the Louvre. This piece made an important impression on Claude Levi-Strauss. In particular it helped inspire his theory of the mod??le reduit, or of works of art as simplifications and scale models of the realities they represent, and other theories of artworks, in his book The Savage Mind. Clouet resided in Paris in the rue de Ste Avoye in the Temple quarter, close to the Hotel de Guise, and in 1568 is known to have been under the patronage of Claude Gouffier de Boisy, Seigneur d Oiron, and his wife Claude de Baune. Another ascertained fact concerning Francois Clouet is that in 1571 he was summoned to the office of the Court of the Mint, and his opinion was taken on the likeness to the king of a portrait struck by the mint. He prepared the death-mask of Henry II, as in 1547 he had taken a similar mask of the face and hands of Francis I., in order that the effigy to be used at the funeral might be prepared from his drawings; and on each of these occasions he executed the painting to be used in the decorations of the church and the banners for the great ceremony. Several miniatures are believed to be his work, one very remarkable portrait being the half-length figure of Henry II in the collection of J. Pierpont Morgan. Another of his portraits is that of Francois, duc d Alençon in the Jones collection at South Kensington, and certain representations of members of the royal family which were in the Hamilton Palace collection and the Magniac sale are usually ascribed to him. He died on the 22nd of December 1572, shortly after the massacre of St Bartholomew, and his will, mentioning his sister and his two illegitimate daughters, and dealing with the disposition of a considerable amount of property, is still in existence. His daughters subsequently became nuns. His work is remarkable for the extreme accuracy of the drawing, the elaborate finish of all the details, and the exquisite completeness of the whole portrait. He must have been a man of high intelligence, and of great penetration, intensely interested in his work, and with considerable ability to represent the character of his sitter in his portraits. His coloring is perhaps not specially remarkable, nor from the point of style can his pictures be considered especially beautiful, but in perfection of drawing he has hardly any equal.