DUBOIS, Ambroise - b. ~1542 Antwerpen, d. ~1614 Fontainebleau - WGA

DUBOIS, Ambroise

(b. ~1542 Antwerpen, d. ~1614 Fontainebleau)

Flemish painter, active in France. He was one of the painters of the Second Fontainebleau school. By 1595 (and possibly earlier) he was established at Fontainebleau, where he contributed to the decoration of the Galerie d’Ulysse (destroyed) and the Galerie de Diane (constructed 1600, destroyed 1810); fragments of the latter have been incorporated into the Galerie des Assiettes. In 1606 he embarked on the decoration of the Queen’s apartment (destroyed) for Marie de’ Medici. The first book that the Queen was said to have read in French was a version of the story of Tancredi and Clorinda from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberate, and the apartment was decorated with episodes from this romance; the heroic portrayal of the warrior woman Clorinda must have been congenial to the Queen. The surviving pictures are now divided between Fontainebleau and the Musée du Louvre. Dubois also decorated the Oval Chamber (now the Salon Louis XIII) with scenes from the story of Theagenes and Chariclea from the Aethiopica of Heliodorus.

Allegory of Painting and Sculpture

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Sacrifice at the Tomb of Neoptolemus

Henry IV devoted considerable energy to the decoration of the royal palaces, but unfortunately few of the paintings which he commissioned survive, and we are therefore badly informed about the so-called Second School of Fontainebleau, which was responsible for them. The name is generally applied to three painters: Ambroise Dubois (c. 1542-c. 1614), Toussaint Dubreuil (c. 1561-1602) and Martin Fr�minet (1567-1619), who may be said to have revived the function of their predecessors at Fontainebleau - Rosso, Primaticcio, and Niccolò dell’Abbate - after the Wars of Religion interrupted large-scale painting in France.

The most important work of Dubois in France, the decoration of the Gallery of Diana at Fontainebleau, was destroyed in the nineteenth century. But many paintings survive from the other cycles executed in the same palace, illustrating the story of Clorinda from Tasso, and Heliodorus’s novel, Theagenes and Chariclea. All fifteen pictures from the latter series, including the Sacrifice at the Tomb of Neoptolemus, survive at Fontainebleau where they are mostly still housed in the ‘chambre ovale’, now called the Salon Louis XIII.

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The Toilette of Psyche

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Theagenes Takes the Torch back from the Hands of Chariclea

The most important work of Dubois in France, the decoration of the Gallery of Diana at Fontainebleau, was destroyed in the nineteenth century. But many paintings survive from the other cycles executed in the same palace, illustrating the story of Clorinda from Tasso, and Heliodorus’s novel, Theagenes and Chariclea. All fifteen pictures from the latter series survive at Fontainebleau where they are mostly still housed in the ‘chambre ovale’, now called the Salon Louis XIII.

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