François Clouet

Francois Clouet inherited both a name and a job from his father Jean, becoming painter to the French crown and serving a run of kings from Francois I onward through the middle 1500s. The court called him simply Janet, as it had called his father, and trusted him to fix its likeness.

He is best remembered for hundreds of chalk portrait drawings, quick, precise heads of the French nobility in red and black chalk that together make a kind of album of the Renaissance court. His finished oil portraits are rarer and stranger.

One shows a serene naked woman in her bath, framed by a red curtain, thought to portray a royal mistress, with a wet nurse and a fruit-laden background behind her. Clouet ran a busy workshop, kept working through the vicious French Wars of Religion, and died in Paris in 1572, the year of the great massacre of Protestants in the city.