Biography

French painter. He was known to be in Rome as early as 1608 and to be back in his native Puy-de-Dôme by 1613. He seems to have spent the rest of his long career in and around Le Puy, with an undocumented visit to Toulouse at an indeterminate date, probably in the 1620s. Most of the artist's pictures remain in the obscurity of the parish churches for which they were painted, and it is clear that he had ceased to experiment by about 1630. One of his most important pictures is at Bourg-en-Brese, the large altarpiece The Holy Family with St Bruno and St Elisabeth of 1626, which shows the artist's careful assimilation of the style of the Roman painter Carlo Saraceni.

There is now a dispute as to whether some pictures are by Saraceni or Guy François, notably the Holy Family in the Wadsworth Athenaeum Hartford, which seems characteristic of both artists. Unlike Tournier, François never showed any passion in his art; his pictures always retained a Saracenesque smoothness and elegance.