Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France Art and Nation After the Hundred Years War Erik Inglis

Jean Fouquet was France's most important fifteenth-century artist, painting for the courts of Charles VII and Louis XI. His art synthesized the realistic style of Flemish artists like van Eyck with the monumentality of Florentines like Masaccio. Fouquet's work had a powerful appeal, shaping the next two generations of painters and introducing a taste for Italian art to the French. The first survey of Fouquet's work in English in nearly sixty years, this captivating book offers a major advance in scholarship about the artist and his far-reaching impact. Erik Inglis links Fouquet's style, iconography and audience to explain how his art helped define French identity, a project of great importance for anxious courtiers in the wake of the Hundred Years War. "Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France" provides a new lens for looking at the century that saw the greatest changes in French art prior to Impressionism.

Erik Inglis is Associate Professor of Art at Oberlin College in Ohio.

"Beautifully illustrated Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France deserves a warm welcome…Inglis’s book is a useful introduction…will surely arouse discussion and reflection."—Patricia Stirnemann, Burlington Magazine

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