"Pieter Boel, Painter of Louis XIV's Animals - The collection of painted studies from the Gobelins"
2001-09-12 until 2001-12-17
Louvre Museum
Paris, , FR

Painter and drawer of animals for Louis XIV, Pieter Boel was said to have been the student of the great painter of still life paintings and animals Jan Fyt, from Anvers like him. Familiarised with Castiglione' s works during his journey to Genes from 1647 to 1649, the artist joins, from 1668 onwards, the painters, most of them Flemish, who work under the supervision of Charles Le Brun.

Since more than a century onwards, Pieter Boel' s studies, there are 80 of them, have been dispersed between the Louvre and other different French Museum and are reunited for the exhibition. They are part of some paintings from Louis XIV' s collection and were for a very long time ascribed to the painter François Desportes. The studies were meant to be used as models for animals, which appear in the foreground of the tapestries of the prestigious hanging from Mois or Royal Mansions. Current archive discoveries show exactly the road these works have made from the Goblins to the Louvre and support fully their reattribution to Pieter Boel. This exhibition will enable visitors to appreciate Pieter Boel' s originality and virtuosity, who appears, through his paintings brushed in a spirited way, being a wonderful observer of the nature, moreover of lively nature, because he was inspired by birds and mammals he was able to observe in the Versailles Menagerie, which was newly settled, and not dead animals, like it is often the case for artists at that time. One will appreciate the painted structures by Boel on a same canvas, with details of the animal, seen under different views, and also the quasi tactile rendering of fur or feathers of his models, which seem very natural, on the opposite of stuffed animals, around which an artist may only turn. It is one reason why these drawings, very lively, were so loved by French artists, like Desportes, already quoted but also Oudry and Chardin.

IMAGE
Pieter Boel
1624 - 1674
Double study of a head of dromedary
musée du Louvre
inv 3987
Copyright RMN/Gérard Blot

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