Jean Clouet

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean Clouet, who is also recorded as Janet or Jehannot, painted the faces of the French court under King Francis I, and yet not one surviving picture has been proved to be his. He was born around 1485 in the Burgundian Netherlands and did his best-known work in France. He worked as a painter, a draughtsman and a miniaturist. Who was he, and how did a foreign-born artist become the king's portraitist? What can anyone say with confidence about the things he made?

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• 2. Uncertain Origins

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  Two towns compete for Jean Clouet's birthplace: French-speaking Valenciennes in the County of Hainaut, and Flemish-speaking Brussels in the Duchy of Brabant. Art historians have generally assumed he was a native of one of them, though little else is known about his early life. He may be the Jehan Cloet from Brussels who appears in the accounts of the Duke of Burgundy. His father may have been Michel Clauwet or Clauet, a painter from Valenciennes who had settled in Brussels.

  A document dated the 6th of May 1499 deals with the succession of the painter Simon Marmion, who was Clouet's uncle. It names two minor children of Michel, called Janet and Polet. Nothing proves that this Janet Clauwet was the future court painter. What is clear is that Clouet trained in Flanders and then spent most of his career in France. The accounts of Francis I would soon begin to record a painter named Clouet.

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• 3. Court Painter

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  The court accounts attest to Clouet's link with Francis I in Paris from 1516 until 1537. He began as painter and wardrobe valet, at wages of 180 livres tournois. In 1519 he was promoted to extraordinary valet. In 1524 he received a newly created post, painter and gentleman.

  The death of the court painter Jean Bourdichon in 1522 brought a raise to 240 livres. That put Clouet level with Jean Perréal, who held the title of official portrait painter. Perréal left in 1527, which made Clouet the highest paid ordinary painter at court. He became the almost exclusive creator of portraits for the royal family and the court.

  Clouet also held the title of master painter, which he likely received in Flanders. It allowed him to take private patrons. In 1516 he painted the portrait of Jacques Thiboust, a notary of the King. In 1522 his uncle by marriage, Pierre Fichepain, commissioned a Saint Jerome from him. Clouet's household, meanwhile, was growing in Tours.

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• 4. A Painter's Household

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  Tours was home to Clouet in the 1520s, and there he met and married Jeanne Boucault, the daughter of a goldsmith. The couple had two children, François and Catherine. François would succeed his father as a court painter. Catherine married Abel Foullon, and their son Benjamin Foullon, sometimes spelled Foulon, also became a portrait painter and miniaturist.

  The painter Simon Bélot worked in Jean's workshop in Tours. At the end of the 1520s the family moved to Paris and settled in the rue Sainte-Avoye.

  Clouet's brother Paul, known as Clouet de Navarre, served Marguerite d'Angoulême, the sister of Francis I. A letter she wrote about 1529 refers to him. The next decade would bring a change in the family's fortunes at court.

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• 5. Final Years and Estate

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  In 1540 Clouet, perhaps ill, was replaced in the king's service by his son François. In July of that year he served as godfather to a child of Mathurin Régnier. He died soon afterwards, in late 1540 or early 1541, and was buried in the Holy Innocents' Cemetery.

  An act in the Trésor des Chartes, the ancient archives of the French crown, records the succession to his post as painter and valet from November 1541. It also states that Clouet was born outside France and never became a naturalized Frenchman. Under French law, a foreigner's estate would normally have escheated to the crown. The act made an exception and allowed François to inherit his father's estate. The paintings and drawings that carry Clouet's name are a more tangled inheritance.

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• 6. The Attributed Paintings

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  Roughly 10 to 15 portrait paintings are currently credited to Clouet, along with fewer miniatures. The earliest dated panel on the list is the Portrait of Francis I as Saint John the Baptist, from 1518. It measures 96.5 by 79 cm and hangs in the Louvre. Another portrait of Francis I from about 1530, at 96 by 74 cm, is also in the Louvre.

  The Saint Louis Art Museum holds the Portrait of a Banker, dated 1522. The Minneapolis Institute of Art has a portrait of Charlotte of France from about 1522. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp owns a small portrait of the Dauphin Francis, painted between 1522 and 1525.

  Portraits of nobles are scattered further afield. The National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh has the Portrait of Madame de Canaples, from about 1525. Claude de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, appears in a panel of 1528-1530 at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool has a portrait of Marguerite d'Angoulême from about 1530.

  Hampton Court holds a Portrait of a Man Holding a Volume of Petrarch, once said to show Claude d'Urfé. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns the portrait of Guillaume Budé, from about 1536. A 1530 portrait of the mathematician Oronce Finé is lost as a painting and survives only through a print.

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• 7. Chalk and Miniatures

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  Some 130 portrait drawings are preserved at the Musée Condé in Chantilly, and Clouet is generally believed to be the author of a very large number of them. Other drawings are held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Jean and his son François are particularly known for these drawings, made in black chalk and pure red chalk.

  Seven miniature portraits in the Manuscript of the Gallic War, catalogued as 13,429 at the Bibliothèque Nationale, are attributed to Clouet with very strong probability. An eighth belongs to the collection of J. Pierpont Morgan. It shows Charles I de Cossé, Maréchal de Brissac, and matches the other seven in its characteristics. More miniatures in Morgan's collection resemble the drawings at Chantilly and in Paris, so they may be his with some strong degree of probability.

  The drawings in France include portraits of all the important people of Francis I's era. Definite evidence is still lacking for the best of them, and for certain oil paintings as well. In one album the portraits carry notes written by the king himself. His merry reflections, stinging taunts and biting satires help explain the life of his court.

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