François Clouet

• 1. Introduction

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  François Clouet died on the 22nd of December 1572, just months after the massacre of St Bartholomew shook France to its foundations. His will, still in existence today, mentions his sister and his two illegitimate daughters, and accounts for a considerable amount of property. Those daughters later became nuns. It is a quiet ending for a man who had spent decades at the centre of royal power, capturing the faces of kings, queens, and the high nobility of the French Renaissance in chalk, paint, and miniature.

  Who was this painter who inherited not only his father's workshop but his father's very nickname? How did a craftsman from Tours become the keeper of royal likenesses across multiple reigns? And why did a portrait he made end up inspiring one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century?

• 2. A Father's Shadow

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  Jean Clouet, François's father, was a native of the Southern Netherlands, probably from the Brussels area, who rose to become court painter to the king of France. François was born in Tours, trained under his father, and when Jean died, he stepped almost seamlessly into the same role. A document dated December 1541 records the king formally renouncing Jean's estate in François's favour. That estate had escheated to the crown because Jean was a foreigner. The document also notes that the younger Clouet had followed his father's art very closely.

  François even inherited his father's nickname, Janet, and early sources and older literature often refer to him by that name alone. He held the same offices his father had held: groom of the chamber and painter in ordinary to the king. His salary picked up, in effect, exactly where his father's had left off. Catherine de Medici, writing to the ambassador in London, referred to him as Maistre Jamet when describing his work on a portrait of François, duc d'Alençon.

• 3. Royal Faces in Chalk and Paint

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  Among the portraits attributed to Clouet, one of the most striking is a chalk drawing of Mary, Queen of Scots, held in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Two portraits of Charles IX share a similar character, as does a portrait of Marguerite of France at Chantilly. The portrait of Francis I appears in two versions: one at the Uffizi and one at the Louvre, with various related drawings also attributed to his hand.

  He probably painted the portrait of Catherine de' Medici at Versailles, and a half-length figure of Henry II, considered a very remarkable miniature, entered the collection of J. Pierpont Morgan. A portrait of François, duc d'Alençon is in the Jones collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Many of these attributions rest on an ancient and unbroken tradition rather than original attestations or surviving documents that would formally guarantee the ascriptions. There are, however, more grounds for confidence in his case than there are for his father's work.

• 4. Keeper of the Royal Body

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  In 1547, Clouet took a mask of the face and hands of Francis I so that the effigy used at the funeral could be prepared from his drawings. He also executed the paintings used in the church decorations and the banners for that great ceremony. When Henry II died, Clouet prepared the death-mask for him as well, and again provided the paintings for the funeral decorations.

  In 1571, the Court of the Mint summoned him to give his professional opinion on whether a portrait struck on a coin bore a true likeness to the king. These were not the tasks of a mere artist; they were the duties of someone the crown treated as the official custodian of how the monarch appeared to the world, and to posterity.

• 5. A Portrait That Reached Lévi-Strauss

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  Clouet's portrait of Elizabeth of Austria, held in the Louvre, is considered perhaps his masterpiece. That single work made a notable impression on Claude Lévi-Strauss. It helped inspire his theory of the modèle réduit, the idea of works of art as miniature models, along with other theories of artworks, developed in his book The Savage Mind.

  In 1568, Clouet was living in Paris in the rue de Ste Avoye, in the Temple quarter, close to the Hotel de Guise. He was then under the patronage of Claude Gouffier de Boisy, Seigneur d'Oiron, and his wife Claude de Baune. The portraits he made for courts and collectors traveled across time in ways he could not have anticipated, and the one painting that reached a twentieth-century theorist set off ideas still discussed in the philosophy of art today.