Jean Fouquet

Jean Fouquet was the leading French painter of the fifteenth century and the first to bring Italian Renaissance ideas back to France. His portraits and miniatures combine Flemish attention to detail with a new sense of space and solid form.

He was born in Tours around 1420 and travelled to Italy in the mid 1440s. He worked for the French court, painting the portrait of Charles VII now in the Louvre, and the Melun Diptych, whose two halves are in Berlin and Antwerp. He also illuminated manuscripts, including the Hours of Étienne Chevalier and the Grandes Chroniques de France. He died around 1481.

His portrait of Charles VII, framed by parted curtains, is one of the earliest independent royal portraits in French art.