Portrait of Marie de Médicis (1575-1642), Queen of France, in Robes of State

Frans Pourbus II (Antwerp 1569 - Paris 1622)

The pre-eminent Flemish portrait painter of his generation, Frans Pourbus II was born at the end of 1569 in Antwerp;² he was named after his father, a noted artist and presumably his first teacher, who died in 1581 leaving him (and his younger half-brother) his ‘papieren vanden consten’.³ Frans probably then moved to Bruges to live with his paternal grandfather, the famous artist Pieter Pourbus (1524-1584), his guardian – Frans’s mother had died in 1578 – and likely teacher.⁴ After the death of his grandfather in 1584 he may have remained with his grandmother in Bruges; there is a record of his working in that city in 1589 – the year following his grandmother’s death.⁵ He may have lodged with his maternal uncle, Cornelis Floris III, his other guardian,⁶ on his return to Antwerp, where he was living in 1591 when he enrolled as a master (meestersoon) in the guild of St Luke.⁷ His first extant portraits date from this year.⁸ These show that by then his technique was impressively developed, and probably to cope with demand he took on an apprentice in the following year.⁹

Pourbus is thought to have been active in Brussels from 1594, and a portrait of the Archduke Ernest of Austria, governor of the Netherlands (1593-95), has been attributed to him.¹⁰ But the only documentation in support of such activity are records of 27 June and August 1600 of payment for paintings¹¹ made for the Archduke’s successors, Archduke Albert and Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, joint sovereigns of the Netherlands, en poste from 1599. In August or September of that year he was hired by Vincenzo I Gonzaga (1562-1612), Duke of Mantua, and left for Mantua in mid-September of the following year.¹²

In 1603/04 he made portraits of Anna, the daughter of Archduke Ferdinand II, and of Konstanze and Eleonora, daughters of Archduke Karl II, in Graz and Innsbruck respectively, on behalf of Emperor Rudolf II.¹³ In 1605-06 he was in Turin to make portraits of Margherita and Isabella, daughters of the duke of Savoy, on behalf of Prince Francesco IV Gonzaga.¹⁴ In the summer following his return the artist joined the duchess of Mantua in Paris where he portrayed inter alia Marie de Médicis, Queen of France, and the dauphin.¹⁵ In the following year he was despatched to Naples to assess a collection of paintings on behalf of the duke of Mantua, from where he also recommended the purchase (unsuccessfully) of Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Rosary and Judith and Holofernes in a letter 25 September 1607.¹⁶ In view of the duke’s requirement he was unable to obey the duchess’s request that he return to Paris for a short period to fulfil further commissions from the French queen; however, towards the end of 1609 he had made that journey. On 20 January 1610 he wrote from Paris to the duke implying that unless he received orders to the contrary he would prefer to stay in France as he was being well paid for his work, to which request the duke acceded.¹⁷

Of the two extant dated portraits of 1610 and thus executed in Paris, one was of King Henri IV (the year of his assassination).¹⁸ A good many but not all Pourbus’s commissions were from the royal family; notable was that of 1614 from the Parisian town council for the chimney piece of the council chamber.¹⁹ In that year he was appointed peintre ordinaire of the king, or, as he was described three years later, ‘pintre [sic] et varlet de chambre du Roy’.²⁰ From 1617 dates his first known altarpiece, a further three executed in successive years are extant.²¹ Ducos lists 105 oil paintings which he considers autograph, and twenty executed with studio assistance; concerning such assistance there is some contemporary evidence.²²

In 1614 was baptized a daughter by his common-law wife, herself the daughter of the Flemish artist Hieronymus Francken I (1540-1610).²³ In 1618 Pourbus was naturalized a French subject.²⁴ He died in 1622 and was buried on 19 February in the ‘Petits Augustins’.²⁵ No will has been traced.

REFERENCES
Burchard in H. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 33 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXVII, pp. 315-18; B. Ducos, Frans Pourbus Le Jeune (1569-1622): Le portrait d’apparat à l’aube du Grand Siècle entre Habsbourg, Médicis et Bourbons, Dijon 2011, passim