François Perrier (painter)

Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl (c. 1646), National Museum, Warsaw.

François Perrier (1590–1650), a French painter and etcher, is remembered for his two collections of prints after antique sculptures, the Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum quae temporis dentem invidium evasere (Paris, 1638), and Icones et segmenta...quae Romae adhuc extant (Paris, 1645); they provided visual repertories of classical models for generations of European artists and connoisseurs.

Biography

Laocoon group.

Perrier was born in Pontarlier. During the years 1620–1625, he resided in Rome, where he took for his model the practitioner of academic baroque classicism, Giovanni Lanfranco. On his return to France, following a brief stay at Lyon he settled in Paris in 1630, working in the classsicising circle of Simon Vouet In 1632–1634, he had for a pupil Charles Le Brun, destined to become the central figure of official French painting in the age of Louis XIV.

Perrier returned to Rome in 1635, remaining there for the next decade, which saw his decors for palazzo Peretti and the publication in Paris of his great repertory of images. In 1645, once again in Paris he painted the ceiling of the gallery of the Hôtel de La Vrillière, now the seat of the Banque de France^[1] and worked with Eustache Le Sueur on the cabinet de l’amour in the Hôtel Lambert. In 1648, he was one of the twelve founders of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture.^[2] He died in Paris.

In 1869, the French city of Mâcon founded its Musée des Beaux-arts with a bequest of eight canvases by Perrier.

Notes

1. Only a copy survives.
2. Thuillier, "Les dernières années de François Perrier (1646-1649)", Revue de L'Art, 99, 1993:9–28.