FOUQUET, JEAN or JEHAN (c. French painter, born at Tours, is the most representative and national French painter of the 15th century. He was in Italy about where he executed the portrait of Pope Eugenius IV., and upon his return to France, whilst 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. Though his supreme excellence as an illu minator and miniaturist, of exquisite precision in the rendering of detail, and his power of clear characterization won for him an eminent position in the art of his country, his importance as a painter was only realized when his portraits and altarpieces were for the first time brought together in 1904, at the exhibition of the French Primitives held at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. One of Fouquet's most important paintings is the diptych, for merly at Notre Dame de Melun, of which one wing, depicting Agnes Sorel as the Virgin, is now at the Antwerp Museum and the other, representing Etienne Chevalier, the Lord High Treas urer of France, in the Berlin Gallery. The Louvre has his oil portraits of Charles VII., and of Jouvenal des Ursins, besides a portrait drawing in crayon. The Museum at Chantilly contains 4o miniatures from a Book of Hours, painted before 1461 for Etienne Chevalier. From Fouquet's hand again are r r out of the 14 miniatures illustrating a translation of Josephus at the Bib liotheque Nationale. Two further works in the same library are ascribed to him : the "Statutes of the Order of St. Michael," and the "Chronique de France." A Boccaccio at Munich is also believed to be by him.
See A. de Champeaux and P. Gauchery, Oeuvres d'art executees pour le duc de Berry; "Facsimiles of two histories by Jean Fouquet" from vols. i. and ii. of the Anciennet es des Jui f s (London, 1902) ; and Georges Lafenestre, Jehan Fouquet (1905). P. Durrieu: Les antiquites judaiques (1908) ; A. Gruyer, Chantilly (1897) ; Les Quarante Fouquet (1900) ; Hulin, L'exposition des prim. franc. (1904) ; Yates Thomson, "The Romance of a Book," Burlington Magazine (1906) ; Max Friedlander, "Die Votivtafel des Etienne Chevalier," Jahrbuch der Konigl. Preuss. Kunstsammlungen (1896) ; L. M. Richter, Chantilly (1913) .