01 Painting, Streets of Paris, by the artists of the time, Part 28 - With Footnotes

FRENCH SCHOOL, (Early 20th Century)

Parisian Market Scene

Oil on Cardboard

8” by 11”,

Private collection

Paris markets – the permanent or weekly, covered or street – are fantastic resources and often very beautiful and atmospheric. For food and drink, markets like Bastille and Saxe-Breteuil are a great opportunity to meet producers and sample new flavours, if not always the cheapest or most efficient way of getting your weekly shopping done.  More on Paris markets 

School of Paris refers to the French and émigré artists who worked in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. The School of Paris was not a single art movement or institution, but refers to the importance of Paris as a center of Western art in the early decades of the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940 the city drew artists from all over the world and became a centre for artistic activity. School of Paris was used to describe this loose community, particularly of non-French artists, centered in the cafes, salons and shared workspaces and galleries of Montparnasse.


Before World War I the name was also applied to artists involved in the many collaborations and overlapping new art movements, between post-Impressionists and pointillism and Orphism, Fauvism and Cubism. In that period the artistic ferment took place in Montmartre and the well-established art scene there. But Picasso moved away, the war scattered almost everyone, by the 1920s Montparnasse become a center of the avant-garde. After World War II the name was applied to another different group of abstract artists. More on School of Paris

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01 Paintings, PORTRAIT OF KING HENRY IV, Late 17th Century, with footnotes

French School, Late 17th Century

PORTRAIT OF KING HENRY IV, FULL LENGTH, ON A REARING HORSE

Oil on canvas

56 7/8  by 42 1/2  in.; 144.5 by 108 cm.

Private collection

Henry IV (13 December 1553 – 14 May 1610), also known by the epithet "Good King Henry", was King of Navarre (as Henry III) from 1572 to 1610 and King of France from 1589 to 1610. He was the first monarch of France from the House of Bourbon. He was assassinated in 1610 by François Ravaillac, a fanatical Catholic, and was succeeded by his son Louis XIII.

Baptised as a Catholic but raised in the Protestant faith by his mother, Henry inherited the throne of Navarre in 1572 on the death of his mother. As a Huguenot, Henry was involved in the French Wars of Religion, barely escaping assassination in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. He later led Protestant forces against the royal army.

He initially kept the Protestant faith and had to fight against the Catholic League, which denied that he could wear France's crown as a Protestant. To obtain mastery over his kingdom, after four years of stalemate, he found it prudent to abjure the Calvinist faith. As a pragmatic politician, he displayed an unusual religious tolerance for the era. Notably, he promulgated the Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed religious liberties to Protestants, thereby effectively ending the Wars of Religion. More on Henry IV

17th-century French art is generally referred to as Baroque, but from the mid to late 17th century, the style of French art shows a classical adherence to certain rules of proportion and sobriety uncharacteristic of the Baroque as it was practiced in Southern and Eastern Europe during the same period.

In the early part of the 17th century, late mannerist and early Baroque tendencies continued to flourish in the court of Marie de' Medici and Louis XIII. Art from this period shows influences from both the north of Europe and from Roman painters of the Counter-Reformation. Artists in France frequently debated the merits between Peter Paul Rubens and Nicolas Poussin.

There was also a strong Caravaggio school represented in the period by the candle-lit paintings of Georges de La Tour. The wretched and the poor were featured in an almost Dutch manner in the paintings by the three Le Nain brothers. In the paintings of Philippe de Champaigne there are both propagandistic portraits of Louis XIII' s minister Cardinal Richelieu and other more contemplative portraits of people in the Jansenist sect. More 17th-century French art 

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