Sébastien Bourdon (; 2 February 16168 May 1671) was a French painter and engraver. His '' chef d'œuvre'' is ''The Crucifixion of St. Peter'' made for the cathedral of Notre Dame.

Biography

Bourdon was born in

Montpellier Montpellier (; ) is a city in southern France near the Mediterranean Sea. One of the largest urban centres in the region of Occitania (administrative region), Occitania, Montpellier is the prefecture of the Departments of France, department of ...

, France, the son of a Protestant painter on glass. He was apprenticed to a painter in Paris. In spite of his poverty he managed to get to Rome in 1636. There he studied the paintings of masters such as

Nicolas Poussin Nicolas Poussin (, , ; June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was a French painter who was a leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythologic ...

Claude Lorrain Claude Lorrain (; born Claude Gellée , called ''le Lorrain'' in French; traditionally just Claude in English; c. 1600 – 23 November 1682) was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in I ...

and

Caravaggio Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (also Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi da Caravaggio; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610), known mononymously as Caravaggio, was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the fina ...

. He was forced to flee Rome in 1638, fearing prosecution for his Reformed Protestant faith.Thierry Bayou
''Bourdon, Sébastien''
Grove Art Online. He lived in Paris from 1637 to 1652. In 1648, Bourdon was one of the founders of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and was elected as one of the original twelve elders in charge of its running. In 1652 he departed for Sweden, where Queen

Christina of Sweden Christina (; 18 December ld Style and New Style dates, O.S. 8 December1626 – 19 April 1689), a member of the House of Vasa, was Monarchy of Sweden, Queen of Sweden from 1632 until her abdication in 1654. Her conversion to Catholicism and ...

made him her first

court painter A court painter was an artist who painted for the members of a royal or princely family, sometimes on a fixed salary and on an exclusive basis where the artist was not supposed to undertake other work. Painters were the most common, but the cour ...

. Bourdon's facility rendered him adept at portraiture, whether in a dashing

Rubens Sir Peter Paul Rubens ( ; ; 28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640) was a Flemish artist and diplomat. He is considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens' highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of clas ...

manner or in intimate, sympathetic bust-length or half-length portraits isolated against plain backgrounds that set a formula for middle-class portraiture for the rest of the century, landscapes in the manner of Gaspar Dughet or capricci of ruins, mythological "history painting" like other members of Poussin's circle''The Finding of Moses'', c. 1650,

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in ...

, Washington; ''Bacchus and Ceres with Nymphs and Satyrs'', Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, etc or the genre subjects of the Dutch Bamboccianti who were working in Rome. His eclectic range of styles have given art historians exercise in tracing his adaptation of his models, while the lack of an immediately recognizable "Bourdon style" has somewhat dampened public appreciation. Some of his work was in the neoclassical style of Parisian Atticism. Bourdon spent most of his working career outside France, where, though he was a founding member of the Académie royale, he was for long largely dismissed as a ''pasticheur'', a situation partly rectified by a comprehensive exhibition in 2000 of his work at the Musée Fabre, Montpellier (whose collection includes a fine ''Lamentation'' painted in the last years of his life). His success required the establishment of an extensive atelier, where his pupils included Nicolas-Pierre Loir and Pierre Mosnier. He died in Paris in 1671.

References

External links

*
Sébastien Bourdon on-line

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20060910021337/http://www.oberlin.edu/allenart/collection/bourdon_sebastien.html ''The Encampment'', c. 1636-38 (Oberlin College) A genre scene set in a fantastic landscape of lowering cliffs.
Portrait (engraving) of Sébastien Bourdon
by Laurent Cars at

University of Michigan Museum of Art The University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) is one of the largest university art museums in the United States, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with . Built as a war memorial in 1909 for the university's fallen alumni from the Civil War, Alu ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bourdon, Sebastien 1616 births 1671 deaths French Baroque painters French Calvinist and Reformed Christians Occitan people Artists from Montpellier Painters from Occitania (administrative region) French court painters 17th-century French painters French male painters Calvinist and Reformed artists Members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture

Biography

References

Further reading

External links