Nicolas Chaperon

Nicolas Chaperon (bapt. 19 October 1612, in Châteaudun – 1656 in Lyon) was a French painter, draughtsman and engraver, a student in Paris of Simon Vouet whose style he adopted before his stay in Rome (1642–51) in the studio of Nicolas Poussin, when his approach developed further. Chaperon made a name for himself with his suite of engravings after the Raphael Loggie of the Vatican, Rome, 1649, but art historians remember him primarily for the stream of fulminating invective with which Poussin in his correspondence with Paul Fréart de Chantelou described this unruly and vindictive practician who refused to carry through his copy of a Transfiguration. So little is known of Chaperon that this episode stands out. In 1653-55 the consuls de Lyon invited him to decorate the hôtel de ville but he died shortly after he arrived, and the commission passed to Thomas Blanchet. Most of his paintings were optimistically attributed to Poussin, and disguised under that sellable name entered collections in the US; thus, when the Musée du Louvre purchased its first painting by Chaperon in 2005, it was at a New York auction. Jacques Thuillier’s publication of Chaperon's signed and dated Compiègne altarpiece, a Presentation of the Virgin, began the reassessment of this Poussiniste.