Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Claude Vignon
Tours 1593 - 1670
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Saint Paul the Hermit
Oil on canvas. Signed and dated indistinctly, lower left: …non 1632.
138 x 100 cm (54 3 /8 x 39 3 /8 in.)
Provenance: Probably Docteur Canève, Fleury-les-
Aubrais (Loiret) (according to the records of 1971 of
the Galerie Heim in Paris); Galerie Bailly, Paris, 1988;
sale, Monaco, Christie’s, 7 December 1990, lot 353;
Private Collection.
Literature: Paola Pacht Bassani, ‘Qualche inedito di
Claude Vignon’, Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte, 1978-79,
no.7, p.95-96, fig.11, note 41 and p.98; Paola Pacht
Bassani, Claude Vignon (1593-1670), Paris 1992,
p.273, cat.150, illus.
Vignon trained in Tours, his birthplace, and in Paris.
His master was the little known painter Jacob Bunel
and not Georges Lallemand as is most commonly
reported. Born into a protestant family, he became a
Catholic at the age of 15 or 16 and travelled to Rome
soon after. Following a long sojourn in Rome during
which, probably with the help and encouragement of
Simon Vouet, he had established himself as a painter,
Vignon travelled throughout Italy and then on to Spain.
He returned to France and settled in Paris in 1623 in
which year he also married. Earning the patronage
of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, Vignon’s career
during this period was intensely busy although he
still managed to execute works both for collectors
and for religious confraternities, especially the Jesuits.
Alongside such success as a painter, Vignon also
maintained roles as a printmaker and as a respected
art dealer and advisor. The high esteem in which he
was held during his lifetime led to his being elected
Professeur by the extremely exigent Académie Royale.
Yet his reputation collapsed rapidly after his death and
by the 18 th century he was little mentioned. Jacques
Thuillier argues that the obscurity into which he fell
was partly made possible by the small quantity of his
work existing in public collections outside of ill-lit
churches 1 . But another factor is the great gulf between
Vignon’s vivid, expressive and extremely painterly
art and the formalised classicism and elegance of
17 th century French art as exemplified by Poussin,
Le Brun, La Hyre, and their circles and followers.
Vignon’s paintings ceased to be either understood or
appreciated until his relatively recent rehabilitation
in the 20 th century as one of the most brilliant and
productive artists of his period.
The present picture belongs to his most successful period
and was probably executed for a church or a monastery.
A painting of two hermit saints, St Paul and St. Antony,
belonging to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Epinal but on
deposit to the Louvre, dates from the following decade
and recalls this earlier work, both in its subject as well
as in its rather Spanish tonality and style (the Epinal
picture was at one time considered to be by Ribera 2 ).
Vignon was clearly fascinated by the subject of male
saints and hermits and throughout his career, both in
Rome and in Paris, he used these austere figures as an
occasion to demonstrate his virtuosity in painting flesh
and material. The Caravaggist painters gathered in Rome
in the 1610s and 1620s were of course enormously
influential but as Paola Pacht Bassani has suggested,
Vignon seems also to have been strongly affected by
the heightened religiosity of the work he would have
seen in Spain. The rich surface of the present picture
surely also recalls the extreme painterliness of two
Italian artists of the same generation: Domenico Fetti
and Bernardo Strozzi. Vignon paints the saint’s flesh and
his overgrown, graying hair with such an intensity of
focus that a sense of movement is created in the paint
which animates the stillness of contemplation.
The subject of St. Paul is not frequently seen in Western
art and the mythic details of his life are ascribed to
the biography by St. Jerome recorded in the thirteenth
century collection of hagiographies titled The Golden
Legend. One of the earliest Desert Fathers born during
the 3 rd century, St. Paul fled persecution in Thebes to
become a hermit in the desert. He is said to have lived
to the age of 130, feeding on the half loaves of bread
brought to him daily by a raven. Vignon shows the
saint in his cave, alone, meditating on death, as the
raven swoops down. St. Paul was visited by St. Antony
and on that day, the raven is said to have bought a
whole loaf. When St Antony returned years later, Paul
had died and St Antony buried him, taking his cloak
woven from palm leaves, back to his monastery. St.
Paul became the patron saint of weavers and the
clothing industry.
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