11 works, Today, August 25th, is Saint Louis IX's day, his story illustrated #237

Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911)

Saint Louis IX of France, c. 1897

Fresco

Palais de Justice, Paris.

Jules Joseph Lefebvre (14 March 1834 – 24 February 1912) was a French figure painter, educator and theorist. Lefebvre was born in Tournan-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, on 14 March 1834. He entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1852 and was a pupil of Léon Cogniet.,He won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1861. Between 1855 and 1898, he exhibited 72 portraits in the Paris Salon. In 1891, he became a member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts.

 

He was professor at the Académie Julian in Paris. Lefebvre is chiefly important as an excellent and sympathetic teacher who numbered many Americans among his 1500 or more pupils. Among his famous students were Fernand Khnopff, Kenyon Cox, Félix Vallotton, Ernst Friedrich von Liphart, Georges Rochegrosse, the Scottish-born landscape painter William Hart, Walter Lofthouse Dean, and Edmund C. Tarbell, who became an American Impressionist painter.

 

Lefebvre died in Paris on 24 February 1912. More on Jules Joseph Lefebvre

Louis IX (1214-1270), or St. Louis, was king of France from 1226 to 1270. One of the greatest French kings, he consolidated the Crown's control over the great lords, proved his passion for justice, and went on two crusades.

Born on April 25, 1214, the oldest of the 12 children, the half-Spanish Louis IX grew up to be a tall, handsome, blond, and jovial prince. By temperament nervous and energetic, Louis disciplined himself with fasting. His deeply religious mother raised him to be a truly Christian king and, as such, he applied Christian principles to his public acts as well as his private life. Louis was only 12 when he became king; his Spanish mother, in France since she was 12, became regent until Louis could accept active rule at 21.

El Greco, (1541–1614)

Saint Louis, King of France, fourth quarter of 16th century

Oil on canvas

Height: 120 cm (47.2 in); Width: 96.5 cm (37.9 in)

Louvre Museum

Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541 – 7 April 1614), most widely known as El Greco; Spanish for "The Greek", was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. The nickname "El Greco" refers both to his Greek origin and Spanish citizenship. The artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters.

 

El Greco was born in Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice, and the center of Post-Byzantine art. He trained and became a master within that tradition before traveling at age 26 to Venice, as other Greek artists had done. In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance. In 1577, he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best-known paintings.

 

El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting. More on El Greco

Louis IX accepted his responsibilities as king with dedication and detachment. He worked to make peace and justice prevail. His detachment came from his conviction that kingship was not an opportunity to conquer others, or to exploit them for personal enrichment, or to use power to satisfy one's vanity. He believed that his obligations were to serve the Church and to lead his people to eternal salvation.

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée

Meeting between Innocent IV and Saint Louis, c. 1773

Oil on canvas

École Militaire, Paris

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée (30 December 1724 - 19 June 1805) won the Prix de Rome in 1749 and spent 1750-54 at the Académie de France in Rome. On his return he was appointed a professor of the Académie Royale in Paris. From 1781 to 1785 he was Director of the Académie de France in Rome and the following year was made Recteur of the Académie Royale. Despite his service to the ancien règime, Lagrenée survived the upheavals of the French Revolution and crowned his career by being appointed a curator of the new national museums under Napoleon.

Lagrenée painted historical, mythological and religious works. He combined a slightly sentimental approach to his New Testament subject matter with a classicising style .

Like Joseph-Marie Vien and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, he turned away from mid-century rococo towards an early neoclassical manner characterised by cool colours, smooth technique and simple, refined composition. Lagrenée won important patrons both in France and abroad.

Lagrenée’s own manuscript, Livre de raison (Bibliothèque Doucet, University of Paris, gives an unusually detailed list of his paintings and patrons. He died in Paris in 1805. His brother Jean-Jacques Lagrenée (1739-1821), a history painter who became artistic director of the Manufacture de Sèvres, was his pupil.

The work of Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée is represented in the Louvre, Paris; the Petit Trianon, Versailles; the Château of Fontainebleau; the Hôtel de Ville, Dijon; Stourhead, Wiltshire and the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. More on Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée

In 1247 Louis sent investigators throughout his realm to hear complaints against royal officials. He then issued ordinances, which became a moral code to guide his officials. Louis banned prostitution, gambling, blasphemy, and judicial duels. In an age when coinage varied widely in value, he issued gold and silver coins which quickly became accepted and helped to establish a uniform coinage throughout the realm.

His efforts to assure justice and to be accessible to all made Louis not only widely loved but frequently asked by foreign princes to arbitrate their disputes. 

Georges Rouget, (1783–1869) Blue pencil.svg wikidata: Q2164632

Saint Louis mediator between Henry III king of England and the English barons (23 January 1264), c. 1820

Oil on canvas

3.6 × 4.8 m (11.8 × 15.9 ft)

Palace of Versailles

Georges Rouget (1781 in Paris – 1869 in Paris) was a neoclassical French painter.

A pupil of both Etienne-Barthélemie Garnier (1759-1849) and Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Georges Rouget became a prominent history painter who regularly exhibited at the Paris Salons between 1812 and 1866. Winner of the second grand prize in the Rome Prize contest of 1803, he was awarded a gold medal at the Salon of 1814 and the Legion of Honor in 1822. Attuned to the changing political climates of the time, his work ranged rapidly from Bonapartist eulogistics to scenes from classical mythology, and to glorifications of the Catholic monarchy. He received many large government commissions. 

He is chiefly remembered for having been Jacques-Louis David's favorite studio assistant, who shared in the execution of several of his master's major works and painted repetitions of them. Working under David's supervision, Rouget laid in the figures of the Coronation picture (1804-1808, Louvre), helped David with Leonidas at Thermapylae in 1812 (1814, Louvre), and seems to have had a hand in Napoleon in His Study (National Gallery of Art, 1961.9.15). During his master's exile in Brussels, Rouget in 1821-1822 completed the full-scale repetition of the Coronation begun earlier by David and later signed by him (Versailles). Weaknesses in David's later work have sometimes been blamed, perhaps unjustly, on Rouget's collaboration. More on Georges Rouget 

Thus Louis was called to arbitrate a quarrel between Henry III of England and his barons in 1264. He was firm with pope and emperor in defense of his royal rights. By identifying his passion for justice with the Crown, his subjects outside the royal domain appealed to him. This helped to extend royal authority throughout the realm and to make him the most powerful king in western Europe. His charity was as widely known as his sense of justice, for he founded abbeys, convents, hospitals, and almshouses for the poor. 

Isidore Laurent Deroy, (1797-1886)

Sainte Chapelle, Paris c.1830-55

Chromolithograph with hand-colouring

Lithograph

16.1 x 21.4 cm

The Royal Collection Trust

Isidore Laurent Deroy born on April 13, 17971 in Paris where he died onNovember 25, 1886 was a painter , watercolor and lithographer.

Laurent Deroy was a pupil of the painter Louis-François Cassas . Deroy was the author of a considerable body of work of French landscapes and animals, drawn, for the most part, in sepia .

Some of his work was in the galleries of the Duchess of Berry and the Duke of Orleans . Deroy, who signed his paintings, exhibited at the Salons of 1810, 1812, 1819, 1822 and 1827 . He was awarded a medal 3 e  class 1836 Salon 2 as a lithographer.

An indefatigable lithographer, he reproduced various subjects for the Musée de l'Amateur , and published countless views.

He died on November 25, 18863 at his Parisian home. More on Laurent Deroy

His interest in art can be seen in his building of the beautiful Gothic Ste-Chapelle in Paris for the Crown of Thorns.

The story of Louis’s interest in leading a crusade is perhaps apocryphal, but it was widely disseminated, and widely believed, and was to be key evidence in the campaign for his sainthood. In December 1244, he fell desperately ill. On his sickbed, he vowed to lead a crusade. This vow was supposed to have been prompted by a vision of the fall of Jerusalem.

Divided by internal or foreign problems, other rulers did not participate. Louis's crusade was largely French, the best organized and financed of all crusades. His plan was to damage Egypt so much that it would surrender Jerusalem to him. 

Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen, (1577–1633)

The capture of Damietta, circa 1625

Oil on canvas

Height: 101 cm (39.7 in); Width: 230 cm (90.5 in)

Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands

Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen (c. 1576 – 29 December 1633) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He was born and died in Haarlem. He was the son of a Haarlem captain

 

He specialized in paintings depicting ships and sea battles, and received orders from the municipal councils of Haarlem and Amsterdam. He painted the most popular picture of the Damiaatjes legend of Haarlem, showing how a Haarlem ship broke the protective chain at Domyat, Egypt during the Fifth Crusade, resulting in an important victory over Islam. This painting was such a success that it was reordered in tapestry form, and both pieces are in the collection of the Frans Hals Museum.

 

The city of Haarlem archives still hold the original records of the 1629 order to Van Wieringen to make the tapestry, the largest made in the 17th century (10.75 meters long and 2.40 meters high). This tapestry still hangs on the wall of the Haarlem City Hall council meeting room known as the vroedschapskamer, where it was installed. It is on public display once a year on Monument Day. More on Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen

His army captured Damietta on June 5, 1249, the day after landing in Egypt. The courageous king was one of the first off his ship to establish a beachhead. But he was persuaded by his brother Robert of Artois to head for Cairo rather than Alexandria.

Unknown author

Bataille de Mansûra (1250)/ Battle of Mansûra (1250)

 Illumination from the manuscript of the chronicler Guillaume de Saint-Pathus

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Unknown author

Bataille de Mansûra (1250)/ Battle of Mansûra (1250)

26.9cm × 36.8cm 

I have no further description, at this time

The Battle of Al Mansurah was fought from February 8 -11, 1250. Despite being overwhelmed and ultimately defeated, King Louis IX tried to negotiate with the Egyptians, offering the surrender of the Egyptian port of Damietta in exchange for Jerusalem and a few towns on the Syrian coast. The Egyptians rejected the offer, and the Crusaders retreated to Damietta under cover of darkness on April 5, followed closely by the Muslim forces. The Seventh Crusade's defeat in Egypt in 1250 marked a turning point for all the existing regional parties. Egypt again proved to be Islam's stronghold. Western kings, except Louis IX, lost interest in launching new crusades. The Seventh Crusade was the last major crusade against Egypt and the Crusaders never recaptured Jerusalem. More on this work

Gustave Doré, (1832–1883)

Saint-Louis taken prisoner 7th crusade

I have no further description, at this time

Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré (6 January 1832 – 23 January 1883) was a French artist, printmaker, illustrator and sculptor. Doré worked primarily with wood engraving.

Doré was born in Strasbourg on 6 January 1832. By age five, he was a prodigy troublemaker, playing pranks that were mature beyond his years. Seven years later, he began carving in cement. At the age of fifteen Doré began his career working as a caricaturist for the French paper Le Journal pour rire, and subsequently went on to win commissions to depict scenes from books by Rabelais, Balzac, Milton and Dante.

In 1853, Doré was asked to illustrate the works of Lord Byron. This commission was followed by additional work for British publishers, including a new illustrated Bible. In 1856 he produced twelve folio-size illustrations of The Legend of The Wandering Jew.

Doré's illustrations for the Bible (1866) were a great success, and in 1867 Doré had a major exhibition of his work in London. This exhibition led to the foundation of the Doré Gallery in Bond Street, London. Doré was mainly celebrated for his paintings in his day. His paintings remain world-renowned, but his woodcuts and engravings are where he really excelled as an artist with an individual vision.

Doré never married and, following the death of his father in 1849, he continued to live with his mother, illustrating books until his death in Paris following a short illness. The government of France made him a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur in 1861. More on Gustave Doré

Louis and his army were captured and held for ransom. Once freed, Louis spent 4 years in Palestine, where he built fortifications and tried to salvage the kingdom of Jerusalem. He returned to France in 1254.

Guy-Nicolas Brenet

Saint Louis IX, King of France receiving Old man of the mountain, c. 1773

Oil on board

Height: 45.5 cm, Width: 32.5 cm

Carnavalet Museum, History of Paris

The "Old man of the mountain" is the common name given by the Franks to the grand master of the sect of the Assassins, who took refuge in his fortress at the top of the rocky peak of Alamut. It was during his stay in Saint-Jean d'Acre (1250), during the 7th Crusade, that Louis IX received the envoys of the Old Man of the Mountain. Brenet's painting is part of a set of 11 consecrated paintings in the life of Saint Louis, commissioned in 1773. More on this work

Nicolas-Guy Brenet (1 July 1728 — 21 February 1792) was a French history painter.

Brenet was born and died in Paris. He studied in the atelier of François Boucher, but abandoned his master's rococo manner in the 1760s, to paint in a conscious revival of the academic classicism of Nicolas Poussin. His cycle of religious paintings for Montmerle Charterhouse near Dijon lies securely in the mainstream of French religious painting. His enormous Battle of the Greeks and Trojans over the Body of Patroclus is an example of the new direction of official art in France. In his unusual and precocious choice of medieval subjects, as they were commissioned by the official Bâtiments du roi, his work foreshadowed the style troubadour of the 19th century. More on Nicolas-Guy Brenet

The failure of the crusade prompted Louis to make another effort. The original plan of going to Syria or Egypt was diverted to an attack on Tunisia by Louis's brother Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, who had interests in Tunisia. About 10,000 crusaders landed in July 1270. 

Jean Fouquet, (1420–) 

Mort de Louis IX le Saint/ Death of Saint Louis, circa 1455-1460

Battle of Tunis in 1270

Illuminated manuscript

Department of Manuscripts, Paris

The fleet of Charles d'Anjou, brother of Saint Louis, arrives in the bay of Tunis. These reinforcements will allow the army of the king of France, commanded by Charles d'Anjou, to win the victory over the Saracens in front of the city of Tunis on September 4, 1270.

On August 25, 1270, Saint Louis died in his fleur-de-lis tent, in front of the city of Tunis.

Jean (or Jehan) Fouquet (ca.1420–1481) was a French painter and miniaturist. A master of panel painting, manuscript illumination, and the apparent inventor of the portrait miniature, he is considered one of the most important painters from the period between the late Gothic and early Renaissance. He was the first French artist to travel to Italy and experience first-hand the early Italian Renaissance.

He was born in Tours. Little is known of his life, but it is certain that he was in Italy before 1447, when he executed a portrait of Pope Eugene IV, who died that year. The portrait survives only in copies from much later.

Upon his return to France, while retaining his purely French sentiment, he grafted the elements of the Tuscan style, which he had acquired during his period in Italy, upon the style of the Van Eycks, forming the basis of early 15th-century French art and becoming the founder of an important new school.

His work can be associated with the French court's attempt to solidify French national identity in the wake of its long struggle with England in the Hundred Years' War. More on Jean Fouquet

When Louis took sick and died there in August, Charles of Anjou made a profitable peace and returned bearing the remains of the beloved king, who was universally mourned in Europe. He was canonized by Pope Boniface VIII in 1297. More on Louis IX 

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, and 365 Saints, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

Images are copyright of their respective owners, assignees or others. Some Images may be subject to copyright

I don't own any of these images - credit is always given when due unless it is unknown to me. if I post your images without your permission, please tell me.

I do not sell art, art prints, framed posters or reproductions. Ads are shown only to compensate the hosting expenses.

If you enjoyed this post, please share with friends and family.

Thank you for visiting my blog and also for liking its posts and pages.

Please note that the content of this post primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online.