Jean Fouquet

Little is known of Fouquet's early life, though he may have trained under the Jouvenal Master in Nantes. Sometime between 1445 and 1447 he travelled to Italy, where he absorbed the work of Fra Angelico and Filarete — a rare move for a French painter of his generation. By the 1450s he was working at the French court, where both Charles VII and Louis XI became patrons. A master of panel painting and manuscript illumination, he moved between the monumental and the intricate, leaving a body of work that sits at the hinge between two eras.