Simon Vouet

Simon Vouet (1590–1649) brought Italian Baroque painting to France and shaped the next generation of French artists. Born in Paris to a painter father, he started as a portrait painter and traveled to Constantinople at age fourteen to complete a commissioned portrait. By 1614 he had settled in Rome, where he absorbed the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio before developing a lighter, more decorative style influenced by Veronese. His success was so great that the Accademia di San Luca elected him president in 1624.

In 1627, King Louis XIII summoned Vouet back to Paris as Premier Peintre du Roi (First Painter to the King). For the next two decades, he dominated French painting. Royal commissions poured in for the Louvre, the Palais du Luxembourg, and the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Cardinal Richelieu hired him to decorate the Palais-Royal. Vouet ran a large workshop that trained many of the artists who would define French painting for the next generation, including Charles Le Brun, who later organized all decorative painting at Versailles. Vouet's wife Virginia da Vezzo was also a painter, as were his brother Aubin, his son Louis-René, and his sons-in-law Michel Dorigny and François Tortebat. Vouet was both prolific and versatile, creating altarpieces, mythological scenes, portraits, and decorative schemes. He died in Paris in 1649. His paintings can be found at the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, and the Palazzo Barberini in Rome.