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 The following was written and compiled by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California: Clouet is the name of a family of painters descended from Jean Clouet (or Jan Cloet) the Elder
who was a Fleming, born c.1420 and who came to France c.1460. Almost nothing is known for certain of his life and works. A more famous Jean Clouet who died in 1540-41 is thought to have been his son. He was celebrated in his lifetime, but no documented works survive.
Francois Clouet was born in Tours c. 1522, the son of Jean Clouet. He was trained in his father's studio; he took charge of the studio in 1543 where it was the fashion to have one's portrait made. To supply the demand artists drew portraits from life in red and black crayon. These drawings were then used as models for paintings, thus saving the subjects the inconvenience of tiresome sittings. But the drawings became so popular that copies were made for friends and relatives and, like photographs today, were collected in albums and treasured. Clouet preferred half-length portraits; Queen Catherine de Medici collected some two hundred of his drawings until her death.
Boxes full of portraits on paper by Francois Clouet were found, as penetrating a psychological study as has ever been done of any group of people. Day after day Clouet recorded the faces of the aristocrats of the Valois court in the declining years of the 16th century. Here they are in all of their fastidious elegance, carousing, intriguing, writing love poems, while the blood of the religious wars flowed in the streets outside.
All of these drawings followed the pattern set by the court painters Jean Clouet and his son Francois. Clarity, restraint and taste save their portraits from mere prettiness and raise them to their high position in French art. Jean Clouet was a chamberlain and a painter of the French court, and Francois held the same positions under Francis I, Henry II, Francis II and Charles IX. He died in Paris in 1572.
Sources include:
Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures; Great Drawings and Paintings from the Hapsburg Collection
Phaidon Encyclopedia of Art and Artists
Smithsonian magazine
From the internet: WebMuseum, Paris.
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