Portrait of Louis XIII
Simon Vouet
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Recalled to France in 1627 by the French king Louis XIII, Vouet brought with him an up-to-date Baroque manner and set up a sizable studio to help him meet the growing demand for large scale decorative painting for the hôtels and châteaux in and around Paris. Even while his impressive output of paintings was establishing Paris as a new center of Baroque style, Vouet also had a more personal relationship with the king, who not only commissioned from the painter a series of strikingly intimate pastel portraits of members of his court, but also had Vouet teach him to draw. Here, Vouet sketches the king’s own likeness; seen in three-quarter view, its broadly handled technique and psychological directness suggest an immediacy and comfort that erases any sense of distance between artist and sitter. Like other products of this joint drawing project, the Portrait of Louis XIII bears the imprint of Vouet's Roman Caravaggesque period and reveals his knowledge of the pastel manner of Italian artists such as Barocci and the Bassanos. Thus, Vouet continues the rarified court tradition of portrait drawing which had begun during the reign of François I (1515–1547), but reinvigorates it with a new naturalism and directness.
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.