The Miraculous Draught

religious

In Jouvenet's later work the Baroque tendency is marked. His most important series of canvases consisted of the four colossal pictures of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, The Resurrection of Lazarus, Christ Driving the Traders out of the Temple, and Christ in the House of Simon, painted for St Martin des Champs and put in place in 1706. Most writers attribute the Baroque quality of Jouvenet's later style to the influence of Rubens.

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About the Artist

Jean-Baptiste Jouvenet

1644 – 1717

French painter, the outstanding member of a family of artists from Rouen. He went to Paris in 1661 and joined the studio of Lebrun. His early works, including decorations for the Salon de Mars at Versailles, were closely imitative of the style of Lebrun and Eustache Le Sueur (St Bruno in Prayer, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). He was the most distinguished of the group of artists who collaborated with La Fosse in the decorations at Trianon and Les Invalides, but he is now best remembered as the leading French religious painter of his generation, carrying out numerous major commissions for churches in Paris and elsewhere. His later work was marked both by Baroque emotionalism and by a realistic treatment of details foreign to the principles encouraged by the Academy. It is recorded, for example, that before painting his Miraculous Draught of Fishes he studied fishing scenes on the spot at Dieppe.

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