Workshop of François Clouet

This entry is not a person. It stands for the Louvre's label 'workshop of François Clouet', the words the museum uses when a portrait came out of the court painter's Paris studio but was painted, wholly or largely, by the assistants who worked there rather than by Clouet's own hand.

Such pictures were wanted in numbers. A royal likeness was usually fixed once, in a chalk drawing made from life, and that drawing then served as the pattern for painted versions that could go to relatives, allies and loyal households. Catherine de' Medici, the queen who collected these faces, wrote to the governor of her children asking for their portraits to be sent to her as soon as they were finished. A workshop version follows the master's pattern closely, and what sets it apart is the quality of the painting itself, judged face by face, which is why the Louvre keeps such panels apart from the ones it gives to Clouet himself.