page_title: Jacques Fouquier
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Jacques Fouquier / Work
context_page_description: Jacques Fouquier, Jacques Fouquières or Jacob Focquier was a Flemish landscape painter. After training in Antwerp he worked in various places where he often obtained appointments as a painter to the court including that of the French kings. He earned great success and a very high reputation during his lifetime and was even referred to as the 'Flemish Titian'. Very few of his paintings have been preserved. His work was influential in his time and was widely circulated thanks to reproductions by various contemporary engravers.
context_section_description: Fouquier was a specialist painter and draughtsman of landscapes.  While his paintings are now scarce, drawings from his entire career are preserved in various collections. The city views he made for the King of France are lost as well as a series of grand landscapes he made for the Tuileries.  Unlike many of his contemporaries, he usually took charge himself of the painting of the staffage in his landscapes.  This did not prevent a collaboration with Rubens on a Landscape with a satyr chasing a nymph formerly in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria in which Rubens painted the satyr and nymph and Fouquier the landscape.
  His early work showed the characteristics of the Northern style prevalent in the late 16th and early 17th centuries as represented by the works of Joos de Momper and Jan Brueghel the Elder, which was still dependent on the world landscape tradition started in the early 16th century.  This tradition showed a preference for sweeping views with craggy rocks in the distance and a blue-greenish palette.  The influence of this tradition is visible in his earliest known painting, the Winter landscape of 1617, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.  This work also shows the influence of Dutch painters such as Adriaen van de Venne and Hendrick Avercamp. The Landscape with hunters (signed and dated 31 July 1620, Musée d'Arts de Nantes) is from this same period and show de Momper's influence. The agitated figures in the landscape are painted by Fouquier himself and are typical of his work.
  In his 1622 Forest landscape (Wallraf–Richartz Museum) he broke with this tradition by abandoning the wide panoramic landscapes in favour of a narrow focus on the depiction of a dark tree and a group of trees. In this development he followed in the footsteps of Gillis van Coninxloo a generation before him.  He does not follow van Coninxloo in the direction of-a more naturalistic display of leaves, but he maintains the abbreviated, schematic treatment of foliage to concentrate rather on the new compositional ideas: uniform space in the foreground and middle ground rather than the stratification of the foreground, middle ground and distant portions and the romantic rocks of the de Momper school, only occasional perspective into the distance, greater ability to draw the viewer into the image, and above all a harmonization of color with more emphasis on light and the direction of the light: The color scheme, especially in the background, points to later developments in the 17th century such as seen in the works of Gaspard Dughet and Jacques d'Arthois. The question has been raised as to whether the change in style is attributable to Fouquier's collaborations with Rubens. No clearly documented works from after the style change are known.  There are, however, many authenticated drawings which indicate that at that time Fouquier was much influenced by the classicising trend of the Carracci's and Paul Bril, which was then being introduced into France through the works of Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet.
  Many of the works of Fouquier were engraved by contemporary artists including Alexander Voet the Younger, Matthieu van Plattenberg, Jan Baptist de Wael, Jean Morin, Gabriel Perelle, Jean-Jacques de Boissieu, Nicolas Cochin and Ignatius van der Stock. The prints provide a record of Fouquier's large-scale works that were produced after his move to France, most of the originals of which have been destroyed or not located.  They show that throughout his French period Fouquier remained faithful to the style he adopted from 1622 onwards.
caption: Extensive river landscape with the Angel appearing to Balaam's ass
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