Montreal Museum of Fine Arts acquires work by master François Perrier

31 March 2020

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has acquired the Forge of Vulcan by François Perrier

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has acquired the Forge of Vulcan by François Perrier. Recent work on Perrier, who worked in both France and Rome, has brought new attention to a painter rediscovered only in the 1960s.

He was born in 1594 at Pontarlier, in Franche-Comté, where he was probably taught to draw by his father, a goldsmith. Between 1624 and 1628 he made his first stay in Rome, where he studied under Lanfranco and assisted on the frescoes in the dome of Sant'Andrea della Valle. His etching after Agostino Carracci's Last Communion of Saint Jerome, painted for the Certosa in Bologna, shows how well he knew the achievements of the Emilian school, and a number of his pictures have at one time or another been given to the Carracci. It seems likely that he passed through Bologna on one of his journeys to or from Rome, though no evidence of it survives. After that first Roman period he returned to France, painting for the Chartreux in Lyon and becoming, in Paris, Simon Vouet's principal collaborator on a number of important projects, among them the decoration of the château of Chilly, as well as one of Charles Le Brun's first teachers.

Perrier returned to Rome in 1635 and stayed for a decade, becoming a leading figure during a period of rapid change, when painters in the city were working in an extraordinary range of manners at once: the last of Caravaggio's naturalism, the grand Baroque, and the courtly classicism of the French, with Poussin at its head and Sébastien Bourdon and Perrier himself alongside him. He spent his last years in Paris, where he helped turn French taste in the first years of Louis XIV's reign towards the classicism that would define art at the court of the Sun King, and he was among the founding members of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.

The present painting belongs to the second Roman period. It shows the forge of Vulcan, where the Cyclopes are at work on arms and objects fit for the gods. The composition is made up of five vertical panels with a further horizontal panel above and below, which suggests that it was made as a wall decoration, probably set within stucco, for one of the rooms of Palazzo Spada, where Perrier's activity is documented.