DUBOIS, Ambroise
(b. ca. 1542, Antwerpen, d. ca. 1614, Fontainebleau)

Sacrifice at the Tomb of Neoptolemus

c. 1610
Oil on canvas, 205 x 141 cm
Musée National du Château, Fontainebleau

Henry IV devoted considerable energy to the decoration of the royal palaces, but unfortunately few of the paintings which he commissioned survive, and we are therefore badly informed about the so-called Second School of Fontainebleau, which was responsible for them. The name is generally applied to three painters: Ambroise Dubois (c. 1542-c. 1614), Toussaint Dubreuil (c. 1561-1602) and Martin Fréminet (1567-1619), who may be said to have revived the function of their predecessors at Fontainebleau - Rosso, Primaticcio, and Niccolò dell'Abbate - after the Wars of Religion interrupted large-scale painting in France.

The most important work of Dubois in France, the decoration of the Gallery of Diana at Fontainebleau, was destroyed in the nineteenth century. But many paintings survive from the other cycles executed in the same palace, illustrating the story of Clorinda from Tasso, and Heliodorus's novel, Theagenes and Chariclea. All fifteen pictures from the latter series, including the Sacrifice at the Tomb of Neoptolemus, survive at Fontainebleau where they are mostly still housed in the 'chambre ovale', now called the Salon Louis XIII.




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