JOUVENET, Jean-Baptiste
(b. 1644, Rouen, d. 1717, Paris)

The Miraculous Draught

before 1706
Oil on canvas, 392 x 664 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

In Jouvenet's later work the Baroque tendency is marked. His most important series of canvases consisted of the four colossal pictures of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, The Resurrection of Lazarus, Christ Driving the Traders out of the Temple, and Christ in the House of Simon, painted for St Martin des Champs and put in place in 1706. Most writers attribute the Baroque quality of Jouvenet's later style to the influence of Rubens.

In one respect, Jouvenet differs from most of his French rivals in religious painting. There is in his work a strong element of naturalism. In the Miraculous Draughty for instance, the piles of dead fish in the foreground are given a prominence and are treated with a relish which would have shocked the Academy in Le Brun's time; and we are told that, in order to paint the picture, Jouvenet made a special journey to Dieppe to study similar scenes on the spot. The same naturalism is to be seen in Jouvenet's choice of types for this picture, in which the apostles are the coarse fishermen which a Caravaggesque might have selected.