Philippe de Champaigne

Philippe de Champaigne , 1602-74, French painter, b. Brussels, of Flemish parents. In 1621 he went to Paris, where he worked with Poussin on the Luxembourg Palace. In 1628 he became painter to the queen, Marie de' Medici. For her and for Richelieu he executed many religious paintings, still to be seen in French churches, and numerous portraits. From 1640 on he became absorbed in the Jansenist movement and has been called the painter of Port-Royal. His later work is characterized by sober realism, simplicity, and austerity. His best-known paintings include his frescoes at Vincennes and in the Tuileries, his portrait of his daughter, a nun at Port-Royal (1662), and a penetrating study of Richelieu (both: Louvre). Basing his portrait style on patterns established by Rubens and Van Dyck, he rendered his subjects with an air of static majesty.

Champaigne, Philippe de (1602–74) French painter, b. Flanders. He was the greatest French portraitist of the 17th century and a remarkable religious painter. In 1628 he became artist to Queen Marie de' Medici and Cardinal Richelieu. After 1643 his beliefs in Jansenism produced religious paintings characterized by a serene realism. His best-known works include portraits and frescos at Vincennes and in the Tuileries.

Champaigne, Philippe de (bapt. Brussels, 26 May 1602; d Paris, 12 Aug. 1674). Flemish-born painter who settled in Paris in 1621 and became a French citizen in 1629. His training was mainly under the landscape painter Jacques Fouquier or Foucquières (c.1591–1659), but almost all his work consists of religious pictures or portraits (his few landscapes serve as settings for religious subjects). As a religious painter he ranks high among his French contemporaries, and as a portraitist he stands head and shoulders above them. He worked for several distinguished patrons, including Louis XIII, the queen mother ( Marie de Médicis), and Cardinal Richelieu. Two of his finest portraits of Richelieu (late 1630s) are in the National Gallery, London: a commanding full-length and a triple view of the head intended to be used by a sculptor as the model for a bust. They bring the personality of the cardinal vividly to life and show how Champaigne moderated the Baroque idiom of Rubens towards a classical dignity in line with French taste in the middle of the 17th century. He was a friend of Poussin, and Anthony Blunt has written that ‘His portraits and his later religious works are as true a reflection of the rationalism of French thought as the classical compositions of Poussin in the 1640s.’ His style became even more severe after he came under the influence of the Jansenists—a Catholic sect of great austerity—in the early 1640s. Some of his finest work was done for the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal, where his daughter was a nun: he commemorated her miraculous recovery from paralysis in his most celebrated work, the ex-voto de 1662 (Louvre, Paris), of which Blunt writes that ‘In its restraint and simplicity this painting is as typical of the Jansenist approach to a miracle as Bernini's “St Theresa” is of the Jesuit.’ His masterpiece in portraiture might well have been his self-portrait of 1668, which is lost, but survives in a copy by his nephew and pupil Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne (1631–81) in the Louvre and in a superb engraving (1676) by Gerard Edelinck.