French Baroque Painting under Louis XIII and Louis XIV

The French seventeenth century, the Grand Siècle, is the age in which France built a national school of painting to rival Italy's. Under Louis XIII and then the long reign of Louis XIV, art became an instrument of the state, ordered, dignified and classical, governed from 1648 by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. The manner it codified came from Rome, where Poussin had settled in 1624, and where the young French painters went to learn it. The story of the Baroque itself begins there, in our page on the Italian Baroque.

Two impulses shaped the century. The first was classicism. Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, working largely in Rome, made landscape and history painting of philosophical calm and perfect order, an art of reason that became the French ideal. The second was grandeur, the vast decorative and religious painting of the court, led by Charles Le Brun at Versailles, designed to glorify the king and the faith. Around them worked the great religious painters of the reign, Mignard, La Hyre, Champaigne, whose saints and sacred scenes filled the churches and chapels of France.

The Grand Siècle set the terms for French art for two hundred years. The primacy of drawing, the prestige of history and religious painting, and the authority of the Academy and its Salon. Its sacred works, and the many later paintings made in its manner or after its masters, remain a cornerstone of any collection of French Old Master painting.