Charles VII, King of France

Jean Fouquet's Charles VII, King of France, painted around 1444 and held in the Louvre, is one of the founding monuments of French portraiture and a work of exceptional historical significance. Charles VII was the king who, aided by Joan of Arc, drove the English from France and ended the Hundred Years' War, restoring French sovereignty after decades of occupation. Fouquet, the greatest French painter of the fifteenth century, renders the king with an uncompromising directness that has no precedent in earlier French royal portraiture — a plain interior, no symbolic attributes, no flattering idealization. The result is one of the most psychologically penetrating royal portraits of the century, an image that has shaped the visual memory of the medieval French monarchy.

Fouquet places Charles in a three-quarter view against a plain green curtain, eliminating all the conventional attributes of royal portraiture. The face is modeled with extraordinary precision, the heavy-lidded eyes and fleshy features rendered without idealization. Light falls from the left with Flemish clarity. The resulting image combines documentary accuracy with monumental presence.