Nicolas Chaperon was a French painter, draughtsman and engraver, a student in Paris of Simon Vouet

Simon Vouet

Simon Vouet was a French painter and draftsman, who today is perhaps best remembered for helping to introduce the Italian Baroque style of painting to France.-Life:...

 whose style he adopted before he was further matured by his stay in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 (1642-51) in the studio of Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century...

.

In 1653-55 the consuls de Lyon called him to decorate the hôtel de ville

Seat of local government

In local government, a city hall, town hall or a municipal building or civic centre, is the chief administrative building of a city...

but Chaperon dying almost as soon as he arrived, the commission passed to Thomas Blanchet. Chaperon made a name for himself with his suite of engravings after the Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

 Loggie of the Vatican, Rome, 1649, but art historians remember him for the stream of fulminating invective with which Poussin in his correspondence with Paul Fréart de Chantelou

Paul Fréart de Chantelou

Paul Fréart de Chantelou was a French collector. He patronised and encouraged major artists of his era, in particular Nicolas Poussin and Gian Lorenzo Bernini .-Chantelou and Poussin:...

 described this unruly and vindictive practician who refused to carry through his copy of a Transfiguration. So little is known of Chaperon that this episode stands out.

Most of his paintings have been optimistically attributed to Poussin, and disguised under that sellable name have entered collections in the US; thus, when the Musée du Louvre purchased its first painting by Chaperon in 2005, it was at a New York auction. Jacques Thuillier’s publication of Chaperon's signed and dated Compiègne altarpiece, a Presentation of the Virgin, began the reassessment of this Poussiniste

Poussinist

The Poussinistes were a group of conservative French artists during the 17th Century.The Poussinistes defended Poussin's view that drawing appealed to the mind and was superior to color, which they believed appealed to the senses. They were opposed by the Rubénistes who believed that color, not...

.

Selected works

All works are in oil on canvas unless otherwise noted.

• The Vow of Midas, Kunstmuseum, Basel, 1,00 x 1,36.
• The Nurture of Jupiter, Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, NC, 0,99 x 1,36.
• Presentation of the Virgin (1639), Chapelle Saint-Nicolas, Compiègne. An oil sketch is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
• The Alliance of Bacchus and Venus, Dallas Museum of Art, 0,76 x 0,98. the painting was identified in 1960, on the basis of a signed engraving of it.
• Bacchanale, Musée Magnin, Dijon.
• Drunken Silenus, Uffizi
  Uffizi
  The Uffizi Gallery , is a museum in Florence, Italy. It is one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western world.-History:...
  
  , 1,15 x 0,84.
• Holy Family with SS Elizabeth and the infant John the Baptist Gosford House, East Lothian,Scotland (The Earl of Wemyss and March) 1,46 x 1,20.. A preparatory drawing at the Musée du Louvre.
• Penitent Magdalene, *Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, 0.75 x 0.61, Purchased 2006.
• Moses and the Bronze Serpent, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes, 1,225 x 1, 715. Purchased 1998.
• Venus, Mercury and Cupid, Musée du Louvre, 1,10 x 1,34 Purchased 2005.
• Childhood of Bacchus, Musée Sainte-Croix, Poitiers.
• Presentation of the Virgin, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, 0,635 x 0,480.
• The Deluge, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, 0,998 x 1,385.
• Bacchus and Ariadne, formerly collection François Heim.

Drawings by Nicolas Chaperon are in the collections of Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie; Bibliothèque nationale de France; École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts; Musée du Louvre

Further reading

• Sylvain Laveissière, Dominique Jacquot, Guillaume Kazerouni, Nicolas Chaperon, 1612-1654/1655. Du graveur au peintre retrouvé, Nîmes Musées / Actes Sud, 1999. ISBN 2-7427-2460-5

External links