Fragment of a Panel: The Virgin and Child
Nicolas Beaurain (glass painter) after Claude Badouin (cartoon) · 1556
What survives here is a fragment of a larger window: the Virgin holding the Child, painted on glass with the soft modelling and elegant proportions of the French Renaissance. Look at how the painter built the faces and the folds of drapery with washes of dark paint and fine hatching on pieces of clear and coloured glass, then joined them with lead. The drawing comes from a cartoon by Claude Badouin, a painter of the school of Fontainebleau, and the glass was painted and fired by Nicolas Beaurain, the leading Parisian glass painter of the reign of Henri the Second. The date is fifteen fifty-six.
Beaurain and Badouin worked together in exactly these years on royal commissions, most famously the windows of the Sainte-Chapelle of Vincennes, and this fragment shows the quality of that partnership: monumental figures conceived by a court painter and translated into glass by a specialist. The panel was given to the Louvre in January eighteen seventy-eight by the glass painter Oudinot de la Faverie. Note the wide format, a clue that it came from a window of considerable size.
Did You Know? The window was designed by a court painter and executed by a glass specialist, the same team that glazed the royal chapel at Vincennes.
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