Jean Lemaire

JEAN LEMAIRE (Dammartin-en-Goële, France, 1598 - Gaillon, France, 1659).
"Landscape with architectural whimsy".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
It has frame of the twentieth century following models of the eighteenth century.
Measurements: 73.5 x 99 cm; 87 x 112 cm (frame).
The author of this work offers us a panoramic landscape built from the reproduction of various monuments of classical style, to which is added the romantic concept of ruin. The work in question shows an idealized landscape in which a series of ruins of clear Roman influence stand out, which can be seen in the remains of a temple and in several characters dressed in the classical manner, so that the work conveys an idealized vision of antiquity where the protagonism lies in the monumentality of the buildings that merge with the landscape creating a compositional scenario of great complexity. The taste for the artistic vestiges of the past, the generalization of the travels of writers and artists in search of monuments and works of art that served as a source of inspiration, and the discovery of important ancient remains such as those of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum undoubtedly contributed to the success of the Capriccio genre. It is a pictorial genre, moreover, that has its roots in the seventeenth century, in the veduta, not always topographical, but sometimes extremely imaginative, of artists such as Canaletto and others.
Jean Lemaire, known as Lemaire-Poussin or le Gros Lemaire was a 17th century French painter who specialized in archaeological landscapes. A pupil of the painter Claude Vignon, Lemaire traveled to Rome, where his presence is attested as early as 1613. There he befriended Nicolas Poussin when he arrived in 1624. Around 1636, he participated in the decorations commissioned by King Philip IV of Spain for the Buen Retiro Palace, creating a skillful architectural landscape in the antique style.
Returning to Paris in 1639, he was joined by Poussin in 1640, who appointed him his first assistant to execute the decorations for the Great Gallery of the Louvre. He returned to Italy in 1642 before returning to France and settling permanently. At the behest of François Sublet de Noyers, he was appointed guardian of the king's paintings in the Louvre and the Tuileries. Lemaire was a close collaborator of Poussin, and the two artists sometimes worked together on the same painting, as Cassiano dal Pozzo's correspondence seems to attest. In Thésée retrouve l'épée de son père (ca. 1636 - 1637, Chantilly, Musée Condé), for example, Lemaire painted the ruined architecture while Poussin dealt with the figures in the foreground. In 1760, Pierre-Jean Mariette noted: "This architecture, painted with great care, is not the work of Poussin, but of Le Maire, a French painter whose hand Poussin often borrowed for the architecture of his paintings and who truly excelled in this field. Thus, only the figures are painted by Poussin."
In the 1640s and 1650s, Lemaire further developed the style inherited from Poussin, with its severe rhythms and measured compositions, characteristic of the "Atticism" that was developing in Paris at the time, as illustrated by Architectural Landscape with Daedalus and Pasiphae (c. 1640 - 1645, Agen, Musée des Beaux-Arts).