Jacques de Rousseaux

1600 – 1638

French painter, active in Leiden. His career was brief, his dated paintings were executed between 1630 and 1636 and he died in March 1638. During these short years Rousseaux is thought to have spent some time under Rembrandt 's tutelage around 1628, and like his fellow pupils such as Gerrit Dou, Ferdinand Bol and Isaac de Jouderville, he learnt to almost perfectly repeat his masters character heads, called tronies, and came so close in reproducing Rembrandt's tonality, chromatics, and his sitter's meditative moods that modern scholarship continually faces the difficult task of separating the works of Rembrandt from those of his skilled pupils. It is true also of the opposite, that works traditionally called Rousseaux have been reattributed to Rembrandt, such as the Man with Turban. Jacques de Rousseaux's oeuvre consists of only a handful of paintings which are predominantly depictions of single figures, bust-length, atmospherically lit with a painterly and detailed surface.

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