Nicolas Froment, the painter of the diptych _King René and his Second
Wife, Jeanne de Laval_ (No. 304A), is frequently mentioned by those who
have constituted themselves champions of a supposed important Early
French national school. The few pictures with which he may be credited
include the _St. Siffrein_, now in the Seminary at Avignon, the
_Raising of Lazarus_, now in the Kaufmann collection at Berlin, and the
_Burning Bush_, which includes the Portraits of King René and Jeanne de
Laval, as the Donors who ordered the picture for the Cathedral at Aix,
where it still is. But the Louvre diptych is an inferior work. Nothing
is known about the dates of his birth and death. He flourished between
1460 and 1480, and was employed by good King René, who was himself a
painter of some distinction, if contemporary chroniclers are to be
believed. Froment died at Avignon, where he appears to have worked some
considerable time, allowing his art to absorb those distinctly Italian
tendencies which distinguished the productions of the Avignon school
ever since Simone Martini had early in the fourteenth century worked in
the Provençal city of the Popes.
A very typical instance of this Avignon school, with its blending of
Northern realism and the noble sense of style of the early Italians,
is the _Pietà_ (No. 1001B). The group of the Virgin with the rigid body
of Christ across her knees, St. John on the left and the Magdalen on
the right, has a sculpturesque dignity and grandeur not to be found in
the Northern art of that period. The Donor on the extreme left rather
destroys the balance of the composition. The mourners and the landscape
are silhouetted against a gold background. The picture was formerly
in the Chartreuse of Villeneuve near Avignon, and was bought by the
Société des Amis du Louvre for the great French national collection at
the price of £4000. A well-known Spanish critic has claimed that this
is one of the very rare works by the Spanish artist Bartolomé Bermejo.
Of the same school, but vastly inferior in conception and execution, is
the much restored _Christ rising from the Tomb, with a Donor and St.
Agricola_ (No. 1001C). There are in Gallery X. (Salle Jean Fouquet) a
few more anonymous fifteenth-century paintings, which need not here be
discussed as they are of no real significance.