Eustache LeSueur

Born Paris, 19 Nov 1616; died Paris, 30 April 1655.

French painter and draughtsman. He was one of the most important painters of historical, mythological and religious pictures in 17th-century France and one of the founders of French classicism. He was long considered the ‘French Raphael’ and the equal of Nicolas Poussin and Charles Le Brun. His reputation reached its zenith in the first half of the 19th century, but since then it has been in decline, largely as a result of the simplified and saccharine image of the man and his art created by Romantic writers and painters. Nevertheless, more recent recognition of the complexity of his art has resulted in a new interest in him and in his place in the evolution of French painting in the 17th century. Despite the almost total absence of signed and dated works, the chronology of Le Sueur’s oeuvre can be established with the aid of a few surviving contracts, dated engravings after his paintings and the list of works published by Le Comte in 1700.

1. Life and work.

(i) Early years and training, to c. 1645.

He was the son of Cathelin Le Sueur (d 1666), a wood-turner from Picardy, who had settled in Paris. Around 1632 Eustache’s precocious talent and his family contacts gained him entry into the busiest and most famous studio in the capital, that of Simon Vouet, who had returned from Italy in 1627. Le Sueur remained there until about 1642, participated in Vouet’s decorative projects and acquired something of his richness and breadth of touch as a decorative painter. During this period Le Sueur made use in his own work of his master’s figure studies, arranging them into crowded compositions with little attention to organization or verisimilitude. The colouring of such early paintings as Diana and Callisto (c. 1638; Dijon, Mus. Magnin) is bright and agreeable and already shows considerable subtlety, while his facility and lyricism are apparent in his principal early works, the series of tapestry cartoons based on Francesco Colonna’s romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), of which five paintings survive (Malibu, CA, Getty Mus.; Le Mans, Mus. Tessé; Dijon, Mus. Magnin; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.; Salzburg, Residenzgal.). During the same period he also treated subjects from mythology, such as Sleeping Venus Surprised by Cupid (c. 1638; San Francisco, CA, Pal. Legion of Honor), from the Bible, including Amnon and Tamar (c. 1636; New York, Met.), and from ancient history, such as Coriolanus (c. 1638; Paris, Louvre). Le Sueur seems to have worked on the Polyphilus series over a period of several years and a development towards a greater sobriety and rigour of style is observable in the later pictures such as Polyphilus before Queen Eleutherilida (c. 1644; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.).

Between 1640 and 1645 Le Sueur produced a number of more modest works, whose variety indicates the beginning of a successful independent career: there were devotional paintings, such as the Virgin and Child with the Infant St John (Paris, Louvre), some of which were engraved by Pierre Daret and Michel Dorigny, as well as portraits, of which the most important is the Gathering of Friends (Paris, Louvre), commissioned around 1640 by the enthusiastic amateur of music, Anne de Chambré. In these works he refined Vouet’s style. There were also designs for engraved frontispieces for books. That of 1645, representing David and Goliath, for the thesis of Claude Bazin de Champigny, has a simplicity and solidity of composition new in Le Sueur’s work.

(ii) Early maturity and the ‘Severe’ style, c. 1645–52.

In 1644–5 Le Sueur was admitted as a master in the Paris painters’ guild, with an ambitious work, St Paul Exorcizing a Man Possessed of the Devil (untraced, engraved). In 1645 he was commissioned to paint a cycle of 22 paintings depicting the Life of St Bruno (Paris, Louvre) for the small cloister of the charterhouse in Paris. He worked on this series for three years, moving away decisively from the style of Vouet (still evident in the first painting of the series, the Sermon of Raymond Diocre). He was absorbing the lessons of the art of Raphael (whose work he knew chiefly through prints) and of Poussin (who was in Paris from 1640 to 1642). The Life of St Bruno was much admired by Le Sueur’s contemporaries. Around 1680 it was engraved by François Chauveau, and such was its reputation that the series was bought by Louis XVI in 1776. But Le Sueur, according to Félibien, was not satisfied with it, and certain scenes are slackly painted and may be attributable to assistants working from Le Sueur’s drawings, the most important of which are in the so-called St Bruno Album (Paris, Louvre). During these years Le Sueur’s work grew more serious, his style more austere and rigorous, though occasionally clumsy and uncertain. His compositions are carefully and rationally planned: he attached great importance to correct perspective and foreshortening in his ceiling paintings, such as the Archangel Raphael Leaving the Family of Tobias (1648; Grenoble, Mus. Peint. & Sculp.), which was part of a series illustrating the Story of Tobias (see below), and to the architectural settings of such works as the Consecration of a Carthusian Church (c. 1648; Paris, Louvre). His figures, with dignified drapery and gestures, have a stronger presence. His colouring, though less brilliant, is more expressive. He came to rely on his own drawings, both for details and for overall compositions, as an essential part of the creative process. Large numbers of these survive (e.g. Paris, Louvre; Besançon, Mus. B.-A. & Archéol.; Chantilly, Mus. Condé; Montpellier, Mus. Fabre).

Despite difficult political and economic circumstances during the civil war of the Fronde, which virtually cancelled all royal and princely commissions during the late 1640s, Le Sueur continued to work uninterruptedly for a private clientele comprising chiefly members of the Paris Parlement, royal officials, wealthy merchants and financiers. At their request, he frequently painted subjects drawn from the Bible or ancient history, treating them in an austere and monumental style. Examples include the Story of Tobias (c. 1644–8; fragments Paris, Louvre; Grenoble, Mus. Peint. & Sculp.) for Gaspard de Fieubet; Alexander and the Physician Philip (c. 1648; untraced, engraved) for Jérôme de Nouveau; and Darius Ordering the Tomb of Nitocris to be Opened (1649; St Petersburg, Hermitage) for Vedeau de Grandmont. Le Sueur was also active as a decorator of chapels and private oratories, painting the monumental Raising of Tabitha (1647; Toronto, A.G. Ont.) for St Etienne-du-Mont, Paris, and the delicate Annunciation (1650; Toledo, OH, Mus. A.) for the Paris hôtel of Guillaume Brissonet.

In 1649 Le Sueur, appointed Peintre Ordinaire du Roi, was chosen to paint the May of Notre-Dame de Paris, the large painting presented annually to the cathedral of Notre-Dame by the guild of goldsmiths. With St Paul at Ephesus (Paris, Louvre; oil sketches London, N.G., and Algiers, Mus. N. B.-A.), a large pyramidal composition, bold and bright, with no inessential details, he produced the crowning achievement of his Raphaelesque style. St Paul at Ephesus, like contemporary paintings by Charles Le Brun, Laurent de La Hyre and Sébastien Bourdon, who with Le Sueur were among the 12 ‘Anciens’ appointed to teach at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture founded the previous year (see Paris, §VI, 1), defined a new stage in the development of the French classical style when judged against the more relaxed work of Vouet.

Le Sueur’s talent also had a more charming, though unaffected, vein. Together with Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, Herman van Swanevelt and other painters, he decorated the Cabinet de l’Amour in the Hôtel Lambert, Paris (c. 1646–8 and 1652; most paintings Paris, Louvre). Among his pictures is the delightful Birth of Love , the central section of the ceiling. The patron, the wealthy and fastidious financier Nicolas Lambert, was captivated by a painter who knew how to make the most of a relatively restricted space and who composed choice decorative schemes in which the richly ornamented setting displayed the freshly coloured paintings to advantage.

(iii) Last works, 1652–55.

During the last years of his life, and especially after 1652, Le Sueur’s art grew still more refined, combining decorative elegance with compositional severity. Line was more important than volume. He employed arabesque-like compositions and slender figures with clearly defined outlines. His paintings became surfaces divided by the play of curves and straight lines, and subjects were reduced to the basic essentials, as in the Annunciation (1652; Paris, Louvre) or the Perfect Minister (1653; Dunkirk, Mus. B.-A.).

In 1652 Le Sueur was again at work in the Hôtel Lambert, where he decorated the Chambre des Muses with five paintings depicting the nine Muses and a ceiling painting of Phaeton Asking Apollo’s Permission to Drive the Chariot of the Sun (all Paris, Louvre). He also executed the ceiling of the Cabinet des Bains (in situ). In these intimate works, which combine figures and landscape, Le Sueur’s subtle colour harmonies and blond light reached a level of perfection, and he seems at his most assured artistically. With the end of the Fronde, royal commissions were resumed: Le Sueur was commissioned to paint several political allegories for the Appartement des Bains of Anne of Austria at the Louvre, Paris. The only ones to survive are Juno Hurling a Thunderbolt at Troy and Juno Distributing her Bounty over Carthage (both 1653; Venice, Pin. Manfrediniana). He also provided allegorical paintings of the French Monarchy Triumphing over its Enemies (1654; untraced; drawings Paris, Louvre) and of Royal Magnificence (1654–5; Dayton, OH, A. Inst.) for the Louvre appartement of the young Louis XIV.

During the same period, commissioned by the church-wardens of St Gervais in Paris, Le Sueur executed the first cartoon for a series of six tapestries illustrating episodes from the Lives of SS Gervase and Protase. Only the SS Gervase and Protase Led before Astasius (1652–4; Paris, Louvre) was completed in Le Sueur’s lifetime. A second cartoon, the Martyrdom of St Gervase (1654–5; Lyon, Mus. B.-A.), was completed after his death by his brother-in-law Thomas Goussé (1627–58). In addition to these monumental cartoons with their strongly rhythmic compositions, other late works are the Adoration of the Shepherds painted for the Oratorians of La Rochelle (1653; La Rochelle, Mus. B.-A.) and four paintings executed in 1654 for the Benedictine abbey of Marmoutiers-les-Tours (Indre-et-Loire): St Sebastian Tended by Irene and the Angels and St Louis Caring for the Poor (both Tours, Mus. B.-A.) and the Appearance of the Virgin to St Martin and St Martin’s Mass (both Paris, Louvre). In these works Le Sueur developed a restrained, concentrated, loftily conceived style, in which the narrative element diminished in importance with the action frozen, seemingly outside time.

Le Sueur’s extremely industrious life was lacking in notable events; it was punctuated only by his marriage in 1644 to Geneviève Goussé, the daughter of a wealthy grocer, by whom he had seven children (none of whom became a painter). He worked with a small team of assistants drawn from his family: his brothers Pierre (b 1608), Antoine (b 1610) and Philippe (b 1613) Le Sueur, and his brother-in-law Thomas Goussé. His financial circumstances appear to have been comfortable but not affluent.

2. Critical reception and posthumous reputation.

After his early death, caused by illness and overwork, a number of Le Sueur’s paintings were finished by Goussé, but his pure and graceful style was soon overshadowed by the classicism of Charles Le Brun, who rapidly became the dominant figure in French art of the 1660s and 1670s. Nevertheless, in the 18th century, when Le Sueur was considered as the ‘French Raphael’, he came to be seen as one of the greatest figures in the history of art and a clear exemplar for history painters. In the 19th century a whole Romantic myth developed around him, turning him into an impoverished, persecuted painter, soft-hearted and pious, a kind of Parisian Fra Angelico. This ambiguous fame was based initially on the apocryphal tales of his self-styled descendant, the composer Jean-François Le Sueur (1760–1837), and embroidered by later writers including Théophile Gautier and his collaborators in Les Dieux et demi-dieux de la peinture (1864), as well as in a number of sentimental genre paintings such as Jean Vignaud’s Death of Le Sueur (exh. Salon 1812; Versailles, Château). In reaction later writers began to charge him with academicism and sentimentality, especially since many of his works are badly preserved, and it is not always possible to distinguish between autograph originals, works painted with the help of assistants, copies and mere pastiches of more recent date. The full individuality and complexity of his art only began to be recognized in the second half of the 20th century; it is an art that is varied and often more powerful than has been admitted. On ground prepared by Vouet, Le Sueur developed his innovative, sometimes paradoxical, style, in which the strength of the final result is achieved by great economy of means.

Alain Mérot. "Le Sueur, Eustache." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T050625 (accessed March 6, 2012).