Charles Le Brun

French painter and designer

• Born: February 24, 1619
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: February 12, 1690
• Place of death: Paris, France

One of the greatest French painters of the seventeenth century, Le Brun helped design and decorate the Palace of Versailles; directed the Gobelin factories that supplied tapestries, art, and furnishings to Louis XIV; and cofounded France’s Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and the French Academy in Rome.

Early Life

Charles Le Brun (shahrl luh bruhn) was one of eight children born to the sculptor Nicolas Le Brun. Charles’s brothers Nicolas and Gabriel became a noted sculptor and a painter and engraver, respectively. Young Charles showed signs of talent as a sculptor and draftsman, and his father had him apprenticed at the age of thirteen to the Parisian painter François Perrier. The youth was more interested in Perrier’s collection of sketches of Roman antiquities than he was in his master’s lessons, however, and the association was short-lived.

Charles’s mother, Julienne Lebé, had family in the king’s service, and his father was working for Chancellor Pierre Séguier during Charles’s youth. When he was fifteen, Charles was introduced formally to Séguier, who in turn placed him in the care of Simon Vouet, who was then painting the chancellor’s library in the Hôtel de Bellegarde. Charles learned what he could, quickly grew bored, and moved to the royal palace of Fontainebleau, where he sketched and painted the masterpieces in the king’s collection. He was rapidly becoming a master imitator of others’ styles, including late mannerism, early Baroque, and early classical, while slowly developing a style that was distinctly his own. Le Brun returned to Séguier’s employ and completed three major classical canvases for Cardinal de Richelieu, which hung in the royal palace. On June 26, 1638, he was named painter to the king.

With Séguier’s financial support, letters of introduction to Pope Urban VIII and Cardinal Antoinio Barberini, and the companionship of the famed French painter Nicolas Poussin, who was twenty-five years his senior, Le Brun set off for Rome in the summer of 1642. During his three-year stay, he read voraciously and created some five hundred sketches and paintings of ancient and Renaissance masterworks. He also learned to imitate Poussin’s style deftly and to appreciate the mundane elements of Roman material life through his study of archeological discoveries that were finding their way into local collections. These bits of everyday life would add authenticity and a clearly classical flavor to his later historical and mythological canvases.

Life’s Work

During the decade after his return from Rome, Le Brun produced numerous works, predominantly religious, for churches and convents in Paris. For the queen mother, he produced a Crucifixion with Angels that she considered a true masterwork. He also designed and executed secular decorative programs for several of Paris’s major private palaces, or hôtels, including the palaces of De la Rivière, D’Aumont, and La Bazinière. His marriage to Suzanne Butay (February 26, 1647), a fellow artist’s daughter, produced no children.

In 1648, with the patronage of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, Le Brun and eleven other artists created the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Centered in Paris, the academy was a direct challenge to the ancient guild system that tightly controlled the arts in the French capital. From the beginning, it provided an artistic education that supplanted the traditional apprentice system and even replaced the need for French art students to visit Rome. Le Brun played a major role in the life of the Royal Academy over the next four decades. He was elected its chancellor in 1655, rector “for life” in 1668, and director in 1683.

Le Brun oversaw a major reorganization of the academy that opened up the membership ranks in 1663, founded a series of regular lectures on theory and criticism in 1666, and established biennial exhibitions of members’ work in 1667. His own lectures in 1668 and 1671 on human faces and expressions (physiognomy) were accompanied by some 250 drawings and, when printed, became a classic embodiment of seventeenth century psychology through art. Le Brun also established the French Academy in Rome (1666) as a center of art education and attempted to use the two academies to link the artistic fortunes of France and Italy.

Le Brun’s decoration of the compartmented ceiling of the long gallery in the residence of Nicolas Lambert de Thorigny brought the artist to the attention of Nicolas Fouquet, King Louis XIV’s ostentatious and ill-fated finance minister. From 1658 to 1660, Le Brun supervised the decoration of Fouquet’s château at Vaux-le-Vicomte. He designed every detail of the building’s decoration, from cabinet doorknobs to entire rooms. It was a unified artistic tour de force that rivaled contemporary palazzi in Florence or Rome. The expense was enormous, and shortly after Louis was fêted there, on August 17, 1661, he had Fouquet arrested for misuse of public funds.

Le Brun, on the other hand, entered Louis’s service directly and was named first painter to the king (unofficially in 1661, confirmed in 1664). Already in 1660, Le Brun had produced for Louis a huge canvas, often considered his masterpiece, the Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander. It was to be the first in a series of enormous works that glorified Louis by celebrating Alexander the Great. In 1662, Le Brun received a patent of nobility, and in 1664 he was given control over all the king’s art and artistic commissions. In 1663, Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, effectively Le Brun’s protector, named him director of the Gobelin Manufactory. Though best known for its glorious tapestries, Gobelin had a virtual monopoly on the production of art, furnishings, and decorative pieces for the royal palaces, and Le Brun controlled the design process and the nearly 250 craftspeople. It was Le Brun’s unified vision guiding the work of these 250 individuals that enabled Gobelin to achieve a stylistic unity that became known simply as the Louis XIV style.

Le Brun is best known as one of the three principal designers of Louis’s enormous palace and grounds at Versailles. The artist worked on decorative schemes for the royal palaces in Paris (the Louvre and the Tuileries) and the royal château at Marly-le-Roi (1679-1686), and from 1671 he was the chief of decoration at Versailles. He oversaw the work on the royal apartments and personally created the magnificent Hall of Mirrors, the Salons of War and Peace, and Ambassadors’ Staircase, which was destroyed during eighteenth century remodeling. He also provided a plethora of ephemeral decorations, from fireworks to triumphal arches, used in ceremonies in Paris and Versailles.

With the death in 1683 of Colbert, for whom he had decorated the château at Sceaux (finished in October, 1677), Le Brun lost his protector. His opponents, most notably Pierre Mignard, were now able to marginalize the heretofore commanding figure, despite Louis’s continuing support. Though he retained his positions in the Academy and Gobelins, Le Brun’s personal artistic output dwindled along with his inspiration and energy. He now spent much of his time at his château at Montmorency, which he lavishly decorated. He died one of the century’s wealthiest and most influential artists.

Significance

As Alain Merot points out, Charles Le Brun’s significance has ebbed and flowed with the reputation of the academic style he helped create and champion. After a period of critical neglect, his specific contributions were rehabilitated by an exhibition of his work at Versailles in 1963 and the renewed scholarship it sparked. Versailles itself, whatever one may think or feel about its monumentality, remains a testament not only to Louis XIV but also to the genius of André Le Nôtre, Louis Le Vau, and Le Brun, whose individual visions and successful collaboration created the controversial masterpiece.

Le Brun’s management of the Gobelin works ensured a stylistic unity and outstanding quality of production that mark all of the royal commissions of the first half of Louis XIV’s reign. Le Brun’s work with the Royal Academy, however, transcends even these achievements. In his various roles, he helped create the major national institution for the training and education of generations of French artists, an institution that eventually became the École des Beaux Arts. His reforms strengthened the academy itself and broadened its impacts on society, laying the groundwork for the great nineteenth century salons. His lectures and theoretical texts established a framework for teaching and criticism that long outlived his personal influence and even that of the academic style he created by carefully toeing a line between cool classicism and sumptuous baroque.

Bibliography

Duro, Paul, ed. The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Discussion of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Le Brun’s various roles in it, and its impact on artistic style, subject matter, and education.

Gareau, Michel. Charles Le Brun: First Painter to King Louis XIV. Translated by Katrin Sermat. New York: Abrams, 1992. Only monographic treatment of Le Brun in English; well illustrated in color and black and white.

Le Brun, Charles. A Method to Learn to Design the Passions. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1980. Facsimile of 1743 edition of Le Brun’s work on depicting emotions.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Resemblances: Amazing Faces. New York: Harlin Quist, 1980. Collection of plates illustrating the resemblances of human to animal physiognomy.

Merot, Alain, and Caroline Beamish. French Painting in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Chapter 11 covers Le Brun and Pierre Mignard as directors of the royal artistic programs.

Pérouse de Monclos, Jean-Marie. Versailles. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Lavishly illustrated treatment of the great palace, its landscaping, and the campaigns of building and decoration that involved Le Brun.