Sébastien Bourdon

Sébastien Bourdon (Montpellier, 2 February 1616 - Paris 8 May1671) was a French painter and engraver, the son of a Protestant painter on glass at Montpellier; his "chef d'œuvre" is "The Crucifixion of St. Peter" made for the church of Notre Dame.

Bourdon was born in Montpellier, France. He was apprenticed to a painter in Paris; in spite of his poverty he managed to get to Rome in 1636; there he studied the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Caravaggio among his eclectic selection of models, until he was forced to flee in 1638, to escape denunciation by the Inquisition for his Protestant faith. Bourdon's facility rendered him adept at portraiture, whether in a dashing Rubens manner ["Queen Christina on Horseback" 1653, Museo del Prado, Madrid.] or in intimate, sympathetic bust-length or half-length portraits isolated against plain backgrounds that set a formula for middle-class portraiture for the rest of the century [ [http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristina_af_Sverige "Queen Christina", Nationalmuseum, Stockholm] ; "Unknown Man", Musée Fabre, Montpellier; Corfitz Ulfeldt, Frederiksborg, Denmark] , landscapes in the manner of Gaspar Dughet or cappricci of ruins, mythological "history painting" like other members of Poussin's circle ["The Finding of Moses", c. 1650, National Gallery of Art, Washington; "Bacchus and Ceres with Nymphs and Satyrs", Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, etc] or the genre subjects of the Dutch Bamboccianti who were working in Rome. His eclectic range of styles have given art historians exercise in tracing his adaptation of his models, while the lack of an immediately recognizable "Bourdon style" has somewhat dampened public appreciation.

In 1652 Christina of Sweden made him her first court painter. Bourdon spent most of his working career outside France, where, though he was a founding member of the "Académie de peinture et de sculpture" (1648), he was for long largely dismissed as a "pasticheur", a situation partly rebalanced by a comprehensive exhibition in 2000 of his work at the Musée Fabre, where the collection includes a fine "Lamentation" painted in the last years of his life.

His success required the establishment of an extensive atelier, where, among his other pupils worked Nicolas-Pierre Loir and Pierre Mosnier.

Notes

References

* Laureati, Laura, 1983. in Giuliano Briganti, Ludovica Trezzani, and Laura Laureati. "The Bamboccianti: The Painters of Everyday Life in Seventeenth Century Rome" (Rome) pp. 238-45
* [http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/bourdon_sebastien.html Sébastien Bourdon on-line]
* [http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/b/bourdon/index.html Web Gallery of art: Sébastien Bourdon]
* [http://www.oberlin.edu/allenart/collection/bourdon_sebastien.html "The Encampment", c. 1636-38 (Oberlin College)] . A genre scene set in a fantastic landscape of lowering cliffs.