Baroque and Rococo

 

Baroque and Rococo Art Map

Philippe de Champaigne





 

Philippe de Champaigne

(b Brussels, 14 May 1602; d Paris, 12 Aug 1674).

His artistic style was varied: far from being limited to the realism traditionally associated with Flemish painters, it developed from late Mannerism to the powerful lyricism of the Baroque. It was influenced as much by Rubens as by Vouet, culminating in an aesthetic vision of the world and of humanity that was based on an analytic view of appearances and on psychological truth. He was perhaps the greatest portrait painter of 17th-century France. At the same time he was one of the principal instigators of the Classical tendency and a founder-member of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. His growing commitment to the Jansenist religious movement and the severe plainness of the works that it inspired has led to his being sometimes considered to typify Jansenist thinking, with its iconoclastic impulse, in spite of the opposing evidence of his other paintings. He should be seen as an example of the successful integration of foreign elements into French culture and as the representative of the most intellectual current of French painting.

 

The Annunciation
c. 1645
Oil on canvas, 334 x 214 cm
Wallace Collection, London