Charles
Le Brun(b
Paris, bapt 24 Feb 1619; d Paris, 12 Feb 1690).
French painter and designer. He dominated 17th-century French painting
as no other artist; it was not until over a century later, during the
predominance of Jacques-Louis David, that artistic authority was again
so concentrated in one man. Under the protection of a succession of
important political figures, including Chancellor Pierre Séguier,
Cardinal Richelieu and Nicolas Fouquet, Le Brun created a series of
masterpieces of history and religious painting. For Louis XIV and his
chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert he executed his greatest work, the
royal palace of Versailles: an almost perfect ensemble of architecture,
decoration and landscape. After Colbert’s death in 1683, he was no
longer able to count on prestigious commissions and, apart from
finishing the decoration of Versailles, he concentrated on smaller-scale
religious painting.