French Baroque: The Grand Siècle
To view our 17th-century French and Old Master paintings
Part of our Art Movements & Schools series.
The Grand Siècle was the great century of French painting under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, when a national school of order, grandeur and classical restraint took shape around the Royal Academy. It gave France its first painters of European stature, from Poussin and Claude to the religious and history painters of Versailles.
Origins: A Royal School
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.
Early Century (1600-1640) · Classical Grandeur (1640-1680) · The Academy Triumphant (1680-1715)
Classicism and Grandeur
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.
Legacy
The Grand Siècle set the terms for French art for two centuries: 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.
The Grand Siècle in Our Collection
Our collection includes seventeenth-century French and French-school paintings, chiefly religious and sacred subjects, on canvas and panel, several in the circle or manner of the great Academy masters such as Mignard.
