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Antoine Coypel (French, 1661-1722)
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Antoine Coypel
Recto: A Seated Male Nude, Seen from Behind, Reaching Up with His Left Arm
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Biography |
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The son and pupil of the painter Noël Coypel, Antoine Coypel accompanied his father to Italy when the latter was named director of the Académie de France in Rome in 1672. While in Rome he met Carlo Maratta and Gianlorenzo Bernini and made copies after the Antique and the masterpieces of the High Renaissance and the Roman Baroque, and also won a prize for drawing at the Accademia di San Luca. On his return to Paris in 1676 Coypel completed his training at the Académie Royale. One for his first important commissions was for an altarpiece for Notre-Dame in Paris, painted in 1680. Reçu at the Académie at the age of twenty, Coypel enjoyed a brilliant official career. Appointed premier peintre to the Duc d’Orléans in 1685, Coypel was to enjoy the patronage of the Orléans family for several years. He received the commission for his most important work in 1701 from Phillipe II, Duc d’Orléans, who tasked the artist with the decoration, now destroyed, of the Galérie d’Enée of the Palais Royal, painted between 1702 and 1705. In 1709 he painted the chapel at Versailles, having worked at the Grand Trianon several years earlier. In 1710 Coypel was appointed garde des peintures et dessins du roi, and rose to the directorship of the Académie Royale in 1714. The following year he was named premier peintre de la roi, or First Painter to the King. In the last decade of his career, however, he was weakened by illness and painted relatively little. Nevertheless, Coypel was, with Charles de La Fosse, Jean Jouvenet and Louis de Boullogne, among the artists whose work best exemplifies the transition in French painting from the cold and austere manner of the reign of Louis XIV to the lighter, more lyrical style of the 18th century. |
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