Simon Vouet

Baroque painter, born in Paris, France. He spent 14 years in Italy (1614–27), and on his return to Paris became first painter to the king and began a career which would make him the most influential painter in France. He taught Lebrun and Le Sueur and was a contemporary of Poussin, who criticized him but who was not a serious rival during his lifetime. His paintings with religious and allegorical themes gained him great popularity, and include ‘Le Temps vaincu par l'Amour’, ‘Venus et Espérance’, and ‘Présentation au Temple’ (1641). His pupils included Le Brun.

Simon Vouet (1590 - 1649) was the French painter and draftsman who introduced the Italian Baroque style to France. Vouet's new style was distinctly Italian, after his years of study in Italy, from 1613 to 1627, mostly in Rome where the Baroque style was originating in these years, but he also visited Venice, Bologna, where the Caracci had their academy, and Genoa and Naples.

Vouet was a natural academic, who studied and absorbed everything in his environment and distilled them: Caravaggio dramatic lighting, Italian Mannerism, Paolo Veronese's color, and the art of the Carracci, Guercino, and Guido Reni. Vouet's atelier produced a whole school of French painters for the following generation, and through Vouet French Baroque painting retained a classicizing restraint from the outset. Compare French Baroque artists Philippe de Champaigne, Nicolas Poussin and above all, Charles le Brun, his most influential pupil, who organized all the interior decorative painting at Versailles and dictated official style at the court of Louis XIV of France, but who jealously excluded Vouet from the Académie Royale in 1648. Vouet's other students included Valentin de Boulogne, the main figure of the French "Caravaggisti", Pierre Mignard, Eustache Le Sueur, Nicolas Chaperon, Claude Mellan and the Flemish artist Abraham Willaerts.