Biography

French painter, the outstanding member of a family of artists from Rouen. He went to Paris in 1661 and joined the studio of Lebrun. His early works, including decorations for the Salon de Mars at Versailles, were closely imitative of the style of Lebrun and Eustache Le Sueur (St Bruno in Prayer, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). He was the most distinguished of the group of artists who collaborated with La Fosse in the decorations at Trianon and Les Invalides, but he is now best remembered as the leading French religious painter of his generation, carrying out numerous major commissions for churches in Paris and elsewhere. His later work was marked both by Baroque emotionalism and by a realistic treatment of details foreign to the principles encouraged by the Academy. It is recorded, for example, that before painting his Miraculous Draught of Fishes he studied fishing scenes on the spot at Dieppe.