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Jean Fouquet or Jehan Fouquet (1420 - 1481) was a French painter.

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 External links 4 References

Jean Fouquet was born in Tours. He is the most important French painter of the 15th century, mastering both large-scale painting and manuscript illumination. Of his life little is known, but it is certain that he was in Italy about 1437, where he executed a portrait of Pope Eugene IV, and that upon his return to France, while retaining his purely French sentiment, he grafted the elements of the Tuscan style, which he had acquired during his sojourn in Italy, upon the style of the Van Eycks, which was the basis of early 15th-century French art, and thus became the founder of an important new school. He was court painter to Louis XI.

Also referred to as Souquet, Jean's supreme excellence as an illuminator and miniaturist, the exquisite precision in the rendering of the finest detail, and his power of clear characterization in work on this minute scale, have long since procured him an eminent position in the art of his country; his importance as a painter was fully realized when his portraits and altarpieces were for the first time brought together from various parts of Europe, at the exhibition of the French Primitives held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

One of Fouquet's most important paintings is the diptych, formerly at Notre Dame de Melun, of which one wing, depicting Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, is now at the Antwerp Museum and the other in the Berlin Gallery. The Louvre has his oil portraits of Charles VII, of Count Wilczek, and of Guillaume Jouvenal des Ursins, as well as a portrait drawing in crayon; while an authentic portrait from his brush is in the Liechtenstein collection.

Far more numerous are his illuminated books and miniatures that have come down to us. The Musée Condé in Chantilly contains forty miniatures from a Book of Hours, painted in 1461 for Etienne Chevalier who is portrayed by Fouquet on the Berlin wing of the Melun altarpiece. From Fouquet's hand again are eleven out of the fourteen miniatures illustrating a translation of Josephus at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The second volume of this manuscript, unfortunately with only one of the original thirteen miniatures, was discovered and bought in 1903 by Mr Henry Yates Thompson at a London sale, and restored by him to France.

English version of online exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France but French version here is much fuller

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.