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Jean Fouquet (or Jehan Fouquet, 1420 - 1481) was a
France|French painter.

==Life==

Jean Fouquet was born in Tours. He is the most
representative and national French painter of the
15th century. Of his life little is known, but it
is certain that he was in Italy about 1437, where
he executed the portrait of Pope Eugenius IV, and
that upon his return to France, whilst retaining
his purely French sentiment, he grafted the
elements of the Tuscan style, which he had
acquired during his sojourn in Italy, upon the
style of the Van Eycks, which was the basis of
early 15th-century French art, and thus became the
founder of an important new school. He was court
painter to Louis XI.

==Works==

Though his supreme excellence as an Illuminated
manuscript|illuminator and miniaturist, of
exquisite precision in the rendering of the finest
detail, and his power of clear characterization in
work on this minute scale, have long since
procured him an eminent position in the art of his
country, his importance as a painter was only
realized when his portraits and altarpieces were
for the first time brought together from various
parts of Europe, at the exhibition of the French
Primitives held at the Bibliothèque nationale de
France|Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

One of Fouquets most important paintings is the
diptych, formerly at Notre Dame de Melun, of which
one wing, depicting Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, is
now at the Antwerp Museum and the other in the
Berlin Gallery. The Louvre has his oil portraits
of Charles VII of France|Charles VII, of Count
Wilczek, and of Jouvenal des Ursins, besides a
portrait drawing in crayon; whilst an authentic
portrait from his brush is in the Liechtenstein
collection.

Far more numerous are his illuminated books and
miniature (illuminated manuscript)|miniatures that
have come down to us. The Brentano-Laroche
collection at Frankfurt contains forty miniatures
from a Book of Hours, painted in 1461 for Etienne
Chevalier who is portrayed by Fouquet on the
Berlin wing of the Melun altarpiece. From
Fouquet's hand again are eleven out of the
fourteen miniatures illustrating a translation of
Josephus at the Bibliothque Nationale. The second
volume of this MS., unfortunately with only one of
the original thirteen miniatures, was discovered
and bought in 1903 by Mr Henry Yates Thompson at a
London sale, and restored by him to France.

1911