CALLET, Antoine-François

(b. 1741 Paris, d. 1823 Paris)

French painter. He studied under Antoine Boizot, attending drawing classes at the Académie Royale. In 1764, with his painting Epponina and Sabinus Condemned by Vespasian (Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts), he won the Prix de Rome, which allowed him to complete his artistic education at the Académie de France in Rome. Callet remained in Italy until 1772, when he executed a ceiling painting for the ballroom of the Palazzo Spinola in Genoa, which shows the influence of Veronese and the Bolognese school.

His first major work on returning to Paris was the decoration of the cupola of the Salon de Compagnie in the Petits Appartements of the Palais Bourbon (1774; destroyed 1864; painting of the decoration by the artist, Paris, Musées Nationaux). Its mythological scenes, with classicizing figure types, virtuoso foreshortenings and trompe l’oeil effects, again draw on Italian models. Another ceiling painting, the Triumph of Flora (1775), is known from an oil sketch (Cholet, Musée d’Art) and a small replica (Paris, Louvre). Together with the painters Taraval, Durameau, and Renou, he completed the decoration of the Salon d’Apollon in the Louvre, commenced in the previous century by Charles Le Brun.

Portrait of King Louis XVI in Full Coronation Regalia

During the years following his return to France from Rome, where he had studied at the Acad�mie de France from 1767-1771, Callet was commissioned by various members of the royal family to execute their formal state portraits. Official portraits of the king were often commissioned in several versions, some meant as diplomatic gifts or emblems of royal patronage, as in the present case. This version was presented by King Louis XVI directly to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the Contr�leur G�n�ral des Finances. (Callet was commissioned in 1778 to paint the prime version of the present portrait.) The portrait adheres closely in composition and pose to Hyacinthe Rigaud’s famous full-length portrait of King Louis XIV.

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Portrait of Louis XVI

In May 1774 Louis XV died of smallpox at the age of sixty-four, and was succeeded by his twenty-year-old grandson, Louis Augustus, who became Louis XVI.

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