Portrait of Pierre Quthe

In the early 1560s the apothecary Pierre Quthe kept his shop on rue Sainte-Avoye in Paris, and his neighbour there was François Clouet, portrait painter to the French kings. Quthe was known far beyond his street for his garden of medicinal plants. A Latin inscription on this panel records the friendship. It calls the picture the work of Janet, the name the court used for Clouet, made for Quthe, his singular friend, in 1562, when the sitter was 43. So a Paris shopkeeper gets the full court treatment, a heavy blue-green silk curtain drawn back, fine lace at the collar and cuffs, a patterned black doublet. What he chose to keep beside him is his herbarium, lying open on the table with dried plants pressed flat across its pages.