Simon Vouet ranked among the finest painters working in Rome following Caravaggio’s death, and with his return to Paris at the summons of King Louis XIII in 1627, revitalized the French art scene with a sophisticated Italianate style befitting Europe’s most wealthy and elegant court.
Vouet painted, even in his earliest efforts, with a vivacity and a predilection for lustrous colours—a palette of lemon, burnt ochre, cool blues and vibrant rose—especially in the decorative verve of his draperies, and a sumptuous approach to the application of paint using visibly swift brushwork. His return to France marked the beginning of the French Baroque, whereby he introduced the classicizing, sensual idioms of Italian art hitherto unknown to France: the drama of Caravaggio, the realism of the Caracci, the colors of Titian and Paolo Veronese. As the premier peintre du roi of King Louis XIII and favorite of Cardinal Richelieu, Vouet received major commissions across Paris, working on altarpieces, church frescoes and decorations for hôtels and châteaux of the ruling class; however, little survives from these ambitious projects and are only known to us through the engravings. Despite the physical loss to his oeuvre, Vouet’s importance was never forgotten, for his prolific studio produced the foremost French artists of the mid-17th century, such as Eustache Le Sueur (1617–1655) and Charles Le Brun (1619–1690).
Vouet’s precocity afforded him unprecedented opportunities. At fourteen, he was sent to England to paint a French noblewoman and in 1611, he joined the entourage of the French ambassador to Constantinople as a portraitist. In 1614, after spending a year in Venice, he began a fourteen-year stint in Rome where artists of all nationalities flocked to be part of the Caravaggesque movement. Vouet shared a house on the via Ferratina with twenty-two painters—mostly French and Flemish but with a few exceptions, such as the Pisan native Orazio Riminaldi (1593–1630)—and would offer free painting lessons to his lodgers. Vouet developed a dedicated following amongst the city’s most sophisticated patrons—from the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo to members of the noble Orsini, Sacchetti, Giustiniani, Barberini, and Doria families, the last of which he encountered on a sojourn in Genoa in 1621. His travels across Italy granted him the first-hand experience to study the other currents of artistic innovation, such as the naturalism of the Carracci and the classicism of Giovanni Lanfranco (1582–1647) in Bologna.
An accomplished portraitist in Rome, Vouet recorded the likeness of many patrons and friends, like Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1653), who he held with great esteem and was instrumental in helping her establish a footing in her newly adopted city. Vouet’s Roman works also included genre scenes like The Fortune Teller (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), in which the subject, format, and chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and Bartolomeo Manfredi are felt. Around the same moment, commissions for works in significant churches, for example, the Temptation of Saint Francis (1624, San Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome) brought public recognition. In 1624, the election of Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII, whose portrait Vouet had painted (lost, but known from an engraving by Claude Mellan), won Vouet the commission for the new basilica of Saint Peter’s, the Adoration of the Cross with Saints Francis, Anthony of Padua and John Chrysostum (destroyed). So great was his fame and prestige that Vouet was elected the director of the Accademia di San Luca that the same year.
In 1627 Vouet heeded the summons of Louis XIII to return to Paris, where he was appointed First Painter to the King and inundated with major commissions. Although many of these have been destroyed, lost, dismantled, or dispersed, Vouet maintained a large, efficient studio and many of his now lost works are known through engravings by leading engravers such as his pupil, Claude Mellan (1598–1688). For the queen mother, Marie de’ Medici, Vouet worked on the decoration of the Luxembourg Palace (lost) and later he was employed by Anne of Austria. For the king, he made tapestry cartoons, drew pastel portraits of the court, and contributed to the decoration of royal residences, especially Fontainebleau and the Château Neuf de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Cardinal Richelieu became a fervent patron, engaging Vouet’s services in 1632 to contribute to the Gallery of Illustrious Men in the Palais Cardinal and to decorate his residences outside Paris (mostly destroyed). Vouet also produced a prodigious number of altarpieces for Parisian churches, and was perpetually employed in embellishing the urban palaces and country châteaux of the ministry, the aristocracy, and other men of means.
In France, Vouet’s palette embraced brilliant colours and combined them in unprecedented ways. He developed a characteristic female type, whose delicate features and fine pointed noses were offset by sensuous figures; in 1626 Vouet had married the Roman native, Virginia da Vezzo (1600–1638), also known as Virginia Vezzi, an accomplished painter in her own right who, it has been suggested, also served as his model for many such figures. His mastery in drawing the human form enabled him to render difficult foreshortenings seemingly without effort. Anecdotal details and lively protagonists rendered mid-action, set before elaborate, monumental architectural backdrops, were other hallmarks.
Though ultimately displaced by the strict classicism of Poussin, Vouet’s chromatic brilliance, sophisticated lyricism, and graceful figure style defined his era, and remained deeply entrenched in Parisian visual culture.
Selected artworks
Top 3 auction prices
2022
2008
2007
Details
Further Reading
Dominique Jacquot, Simon Vouet: Catalogue des Peintures: catalogue raisonné, Paris, 2023.
Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée and Anne Bertrand-Dewsnap, et. al., Simon Vouet: les années italiennes, 1613-1627, exh. cat., Nantes, 2008.
Stéphane Loire, ed., Simon Vouet: actes du colloque international Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 5-6-7 février 1991, Paris, 1991–92.
Jacques Thuillier and Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, et. al., Vouet, exh. cat., Paris, 1990.
Notable Exhibitions
Nantes, Musée des beaux-arts de Nantes, Simon Vouet: les années italiennes, 1613 –1627, 21 November 2008 – 23 February 2009; travelled to Besançon, Musée des beaux-arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon, 27 March 2009 – 29 June 2009. Curated by Blandine Chavanne and Emmanuel Guigon.
Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Vouet, 6 November 1990–11 February 1991. Curated by Jacques Thuillier and Jean-Pierre Cuzin.