Word: brun
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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 français. 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 Château de Versailles...
...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 Séguier (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...
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...
...Niarchos. France's best-known art auctioneer, Maurice Rheims, receives them in his home and talks to them of French period furniture. The Baron Alexis de Redé entertains the girls in his private apartments at the Hotel Lambert (the oldest occupied mansion in Paris), where, beneath Le Brun's painted ceiling, they sip champagne served by footmen. Duke Philippe de Luynes, president of the French Society for the Protection of Historical Dwellings, escorts them through his castle (Luynes...