Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts.
This is the first major retrospective for over fifty years of the celebrated Flemish-born French painter Philippe
de Champaigne (1602-74). He was perhaps the greatest portrait painter of 17th century in France but is less
well known elsewhere since so little of his work left France and it rarely appears on the art market.
More than 85 masterpieces have been loaned for the exhibition by major European and American museums as well as churches and private collections including the Musée du Louvre, Paris, The National Gallery, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Philippe de Champaigne was born in Brussels where he was a pupil of the landscape painter Jacques Fouquières before settling in Paris in 1621 and becoming a French citizen in 1629. On his arrival in Paris he began working with Nicolas Poussin on the decoration of the Luxembourg Palace, built for the Queen Mother, Marie de’ Medici, between 1615 and 1627, under the direction of Nicolas Duchesne, whose daughter he married. His career progressed rapidly under the Queen’s patronage, eventually being appointed her royal painter, and he won important commissions from her son King Louis XIII and the powerful Cardinal Richelieu for whom
he decorated the cardinal’s palace, the Dome of the Sorbonne church and other buildings. As a result of his
prominence he was one of the founding members of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1648,
where he became a professor in 1653.
His numerous commissions also included religious paintings for Parisian churches and for individual devotion.
His style, which already refl ected the rationalism of French thought, became even more severe after he came
under the infl uence of the Jansenists, a Catholic sect of great austerity, in the early 1640s. Some of his fi nest
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, Ex-Voto, 1662, now in the Musée du Louvre,
which depicts his daughter Sister Catherine of Sainte-Suzanne Champaigne with Mother Superior Cathérine-
Agnès Arnauld.
