Official Artist

Whatever Louis XIV wanted, Louis XIV got--in art as well as in life. In payment he gave royal protection, and no one basked more deliciously in the Sun King's rays than Charles Le Brun, "First Painter of the King" and for 20 years the absolute arbiter and benevolent tyrant of le bon gout franc,ais. Swept into museum storerooms as succeeding generations downgraded 17th century classicism, Le Brun has been rehabilitated this summer in an almost too complete exhibition at the Chateau de Versailles.

The setting could not be more appropriate; Le Brun's long career winged toward Versailles like an arrow to the bull's-eye. Son of a sculptor, he is said to have made sketches in his cradle. When he was not yet 15, he won the patronage of Chancellor Pierre Seguier (see color), who later sent him to Rome to study with the expatriate classicist Poussin. Le Brun was solidly attached to the papal court of the Barberini family, and after the Pamphilis took over, he headed back to France. Plunging into the Parisian artistic establishment, Le Brun helped organize the Royal Academy, became its rector, and began to tighten his grip on the new generation of painters and decorators.

Convenient Deaths. Fortune and a delicate skill in personnel placement did wonders for his position: both his teacher, Vouet, whom he was to replace as dean of Parisian artists, and an early rival, Eustache Le Sueur, conveniently died. Sighed Le Brun: "Death has relieved me of a thorn in the foot." Astutely, he promoted a French Academy in Rome, and with characteristic magnanimity dispatched his chief surviving Paris rival, Charles Errard, to be its rector.

Louis XIV granted Le Brun the articles of nobility in 1662, and the road to Versailles was open. The King put Le Brun in charge of redecorating the Gallery of Apollo at the Louvre after the fire of 1661, then appointed him to decorate the great Versailles complex. The artist spent a decade designing the palace interiors, decorating the Hall of Mirrors and the Galleries of War and of Peace, planning the garden statuary and constructing the stairways. Tirelessly, he decorated the famous pavilions and chateau of Louis' Bismarckian minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, at the Parisian suburb of Sceaux, and somehow found time to follow the royal retinue on military campaigns abroad. Dutifully he painted scenes of glory after the battles were won and the surrenders were given.

Even Locks & Bolts. Le Brun's artistic dictatorship was centered in the workshops of the Gobelins, where he directed the manufacture of tapestries, furniture, sculpture, mosaics, wood inlay--even locks and bolts. The style is called "Louis Quatorze," but it might as well be "Charles Le Brun"; seldom has a single man so completely shaped the look of his age. His best paintings were perfectly drawn and meticulously detailed scenes of grand battles and formal parades, but he was also a consummate portraitist with a little-used gift for capturing the nuances of feeling.

By the end of his life at 70, in the late years of the "splendid century," the romantic rebellion against Le Brun's classicism had already begun, foreshadowed by his own experiments with the portrayal of emotion. Academism was coming increasingly under fire, and critics accused Le Brun of stifling originality for the sake of royal favors; they said that no one could have such success and maintain standards of quality. What they forgot was the sweeping unity of art that Le Brun was able to impose on France in an era whose splendor was measured not in flashes of light but in the glow of good taste.

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