Robert Nanteuil (Reims, ca.1623-Paris, 1678). Portraitiste du temps de Louis XIV. L’œuvre dessiné

• Brillant représentant de l’école française de portrait du XVII^e siècle, Robert Nanteuil s’illustra avec talent dans les arts de la gravure et du dessin. Formé à Reims auprès de Nicolas Regnesson, vers 1643-1645, Robert Nanteuil se trouve installé à Paris dès 1647. Conseillé par le peintre flamand Philippe de Champaigne et par le graveur et théoricien Abraham Bosse, très tôt apprécié de Louis XIV qu’il peignit d’après nature, ce portraitiste lettré et recherché, en faveur constante auprès des puissants, dessinateur et graveur ordinaire du roi en 1658, ne connut aucun déclin. Artiste fécond dont la production compte les portraits des principaux personnages des jeunes années du règne de Louis XIV, Robert Nanteuil est l’auteur de dessins et de pastels originaux réalisés ad vivum, souvent préparatoires à l’estampe, dont le catalogue exhaustif manquait. Retracer la vie, considérer la carrière et restituer l’œuvre d’un dessinateur et pastelliste dont la gloire tient davantage à la qualité de ses ouvrages qu’au nombre restreint de feuilles conservées, en livrer enfin le catalogue raisonné, telle est l’ambition de notre étude.

Summary

• Robert Nanteuil, engraver, draughtsman and pastel painter, was a pupil of Nicolas Regnesson at Reims circa 1643-1645 and went to Paris where he settled down around 1647. At that time Nanteuil received valuable guidance from the Flemish painter Philippe de Champaigne whose influence is deeply felt in his portraits and met the printmaker Abraham Bosse who trained him in the technique of burin engraving. Then he developed his own method and gained official recognition in 1658 : Louis XIV appointed him designer and engraver. Nanteuil’s subjects involved royalty and high-ranking members of society. A portrait drawing by Nanteuil was often intended as a preparatory study for an engraving made to adorn the cover of a doctoral thesis dedicated to the sitter or to illustrate a book. Robert Nanteuil was the earliest artist to have used pastel in a painterly manner to cover the entirety of a sheet of paper. He had used sticks of coloured paste to heighten their drawings as nobody else before him in the seventeenth-century French school : he had developed pastel into an independent medium of draughtsmanship. Robert Nanteuil brought into the realm of official painted portraiture the ease and charm which were formerly found only in the drawn portraiture of sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century artists such as Clouet and Dumonstier. The thesis consists of a large study on Nanteuil’s career and includes a complete analysis of his artistic manner as draughtsman and pastel painter with a “catalogue raisonné” of his works on paper.

Jury

• Mme Marianne Grivel, prés. (Paris 4)
• M. Jean-François Méjanes (musée du Louvre)
• Mme Véronique Meyer (Poitiers)
• M. Patrick Michel (Lille 3)
• M. Alain Mérot (Paris 4).