Philippe de Champaigne

Philippe de Champaigne (May 26, 1602 - Aug 12, 1674), 26 May 1602 – 12 August 1674, was a Brabançon-born French Baroque era painter, a major exponent of the French school He was a founding member of the Académie de peinture et de sculpture

Philippe de Champaigne was one of the protagonists of French classicism. His art, inspired in part by his association with Jansenism (a severe Counter-Reformation movement suppressed by Louis XIV), has been described as combining "a scrupulous perfectionism verging on coldness with an inner life of deep intensity." This picture was painted for the private chapel of Queen Anne of Austria (1601–1666), the widowed wife of Louis XIII. The chapel, a small oval room in the Palais Royal, Paris, was decorated by the most prominent French painters of the day.

Born of a poor family in Brussels (Duchy of Brabant, Southern Netherlands), during the reign of the Archduke Albert and Isabella, Champaigne was a pupil of the landscape painter Jacques Fouquières In 1621 he moved to Paris, where he worked with Nicolas Poussin on the decoration of the Palais du Luxembourg under the direction of Nicolas Duchesne, whose daughter he married According to Houbraken, Duchesne was angry at Champaigne for becoming more popular than he was at court, and this is why Champaigne returned to Brussels to live with his brother

It was only after he received news of Duchesne's death that he returned to marry his daughter After the death of his protector Duchesne, Champaigne worked for the Queen Mother, Marie de Medicis, for whom he participated in the decoration of the Luxembourg Palace He made several paintings for the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, dating from 1638 He also drew several cartoons for tapestries He was made first painter of the Queen with a pension of 1200 pounds He also decorated the Carmelite Church of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, one of the favorite churches of the Queen Mother

This site was destroyed during the French Revolution, but there are several paintings now preserved in museums, that were part of the original design (The Presentation in the Temple is in Dijon, the Resurrection of Lazarus is in Grenoble and the Assumption of the Virgin is in the Louvre

He also worked for Cardinal Richelieu, for whom he decorated the Palais Cardinal, the dome of the Sorbonne and other buildings Champaigne was the only artist who was allowed to paint Richelieu enrobed as a cardinal, which he did eleven times He was a founding member of the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in 1648 Later in his life (from 1640 onwards), he came under the influence of Jansenism After his paralysed daughter was allegedly miraculously cured at the nunnery of Port-Royal, he painted the celebrated but atypical picture Ex-Voto de 1662, now in the Louvre, which represents the artist's daughter with Mother-Superior Agnès Arnauld

Champaigne produced a very large number of paintings, mainly religious works and portraits Influenced by Rubens at the beginning of his career, his style later became more austere Philippe de Champaigne remains an exceptional painter thanks to the brilliance of the colors in his paintings and the stern strength of his compositions

He portrayed the entire French court, the French high nobility, royalty, high members of the church and the state, parliamentarians and architects, and other notable people

In depicting their faces, he refused to show a transitory expression, instead capturing the psychological essence of the person

His works can be seen in public buildings, private collections, churches such as Val-de-Grâce, Sorbonne, Saint Severin, Saint-Merri, Saint-Médard and in the Basilica of Notre-Dame du Port in Clermont-Ferrand Champaigne was prominent enough in his time as to be mentioned in Cyrano de Bergerac in a line by Ragueneau referencing Cyrano: "Truly, I should not look to find his portrait By the grave hand of Philippe de Champagne"

His pupils were his nephew Jean Baptiste de Champaigne, William Faithorne, Jean Morin, and Nicolas de Plattemontagne During his last period Champaigne painted mainly religious subjects and family members He died in Paris in 1674

Works:
Philippe de Champaigne painted more Annunciations than any other subject: pre-Revolutionary sources mention at least seventeen examples, ten of which survive today (see Dorival 1970). The present one came to light in 2003, having been known only from a line engraving made in 1812, when the painting was in a private collection in Saint Petersburg.

The MMA Annunciation is painted on a small oak panel, similar to other pictures that were made for the oratory in the Palais Royal of Anne of Austria (1601–1666), daughter of Philip III of Spain and widow of Louis XIII. All documents concerning the oratory are lost, but Henri Sauval gives an idea of its decoration in Histoire et recherches des antiquites de la ville de Paris, published in 1724: "Around the walls of the oratory are pictures, painted in competition by Champagne, Vouet, Bourdon, Stella, Lahire, Corneille, Dorigni, and Paerson, representing the life and attributes of the Virgin." Thus we know the paintings were parceled out to a team of artists comprising Champaigne and Simon Vouet (1590–1649), who had contributed to Richelieu's Galerie des Hommes Illustres in the Palais Royal, and six or seven younger artists. Sauval specifies the subject of only one of the pictures: a Flight into Egypt by Sébastien Bourdon (1616–1671) in the Louvre, painted on an oak panel the same height and almost the same width as the MMA painting. Other works from the oratory are listed in an inventory of the paintings in the Palais Royal drawn up in 1788; it includes another panel by Bourdon, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, also in the Louvre and exactly the same size as his Flight into Egypt; a Death of the Virgin by Jacques Sarrazin (1588/92–1660) and a Visitation by Laurent de La Hyre (1606–1656), both missing; and Champaigne's Marriage of the Virgin in the Wallace Collection, which is the same height as the other panels but twice as wide. When the latter appeared in the Pourtalès sale in 1865, it was identified as the altar frontal from the oratory. A Birth of the Virgin by Jacques Stella (1596–1657) in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, and another panel by Stella, a Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple formerly in the Suida-Manning collection, Forest Hills, New York, may also have belonged to the cycle (Pericolo 2005). The inscription on an engraving of Vouet's Assumption of the Virgin (MMA 45.97[38]) identifies the picture as belonging to Anne of Austria's oratory. Because of its larger size (76 3/4 x 50 3/4 in.) and its date, 1644, it must have been the oratory's altarpiece. Vouet, Louis XIII's favorite artist and the oldest member of the team, may have been in charge of the oratory project.

The decoration of the oratory, a small private chapel on an inner courtyard of the Palais Royal (see Allden and Beresford 1989 and Pericolo 2005), has been connected with the 20,000 livres that the queen received from the royal treasury on September 11, 1645 (see Ingamells 1989). The paintings, however, must have been commissioned earlier, as Vouet’s Assumption is inscribed 1644. Plans for the oratory may have been made soon after Richelieu’s death in 1642. He bequeathed the palace to Louis XIII, who survived Richelieu by a mere five months. Anne of Austria and her two young sons, Louis Dieudonné (1638–1715), the future Louis XIV, and Philippe (1640–1701), the future duc d'Orléans, moved into the Palais Royal in 1643. With the support of Cardinal Mazarin, Anne of Austria governed France as regent from the Palais Royal through the first years of the Fronde, the revolt of discontented nobles against royal authority. In 1649, she fled from Paris to Fontainebleau; with peace, in 1652, she took up residence in the ground-floor apartment in the Louvre traditionally assigned to queen mothers. Her apartment in the Palais Royal was dismantled in about 1752, when the architect Contant d’Ivry remodeled the building (see Sauvel 1968).

Although none of Champaigne's Annunciations are dated, their chronology is suggested by the change in their style from the exuberant version in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, with its ornate prie-dieu and the dramatic lighting of its figures, to the sober Annunciation in the Wallace Collection, London, in which the Virgin and archangel stand in restrained poses. The Caen version probably dates from shortly after 1633, the Wallace version from the mid-1640s or later (Ingamells 1989). The MMA picture falls between them. A transitional work, it is symptomatic of the trend in Parisian painting of the 1640s toward a chaste classical style, tempered in Champaigne’s case by Flemish figure types. The face of the Virgin, for example, looks like a portrait, perhaps of a member of Champaigne’s family; she has the same girlish features as the protagonist of the Marriage of the Virgin in the Wallace Collection. While the painting is not yet in the severe style associated with Jansenists at Port Royal, the calm composition anticipates that of an etching by Jean Morin after an Annunciation by Champaigne in the Heures de Port-Royal, published in 1650.
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