DUBREUIL, Toussaint

(b. ~1561 Paris, d. 1602 Paris)

French painter and draughtsman. He was a pupil at Fontainebleau of Ruggiero de Ruggieri (d. after 1597) and was also trained by Martin Fréminet’s father, a rather mediocre painter in Paris. Dubreuil became Premier Peintre to Henry IV and is usually identified as a member of the so-called second Fontainebleau school, together with Ambroise Dubois and Martin Fréminet. These artists were employed by the king to decorate the royal palaces, their functions being similar to those of Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio earlier at Fontainebleau under Francis I. Dubreuil’s death meant that many of the projects in which he was involved had to be completed by assistants. Despite this and the fact that the majority of his finished work has since been lost, he is considered an important link between the Mannerism of Primaticcio and the classicism of Nicolas Poussin and his contemporaries in the following century.

Hyanthe and Clymene Offering a Sacrifice to Venus

In Greek mythology, Hyanthe and Clymene are the two daughters of a king of Crete who rescued Francus, the Trojan ancestor of the Franks, when he was shipwrecked. Dubreuil’s painting belonged to a group of about sixty paintings that Henri IV commissioned between 1594 and 1602 for the Château Neuf of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

Dubreuil’s paintings in the Petite Galerie of the Louvre, now the Galerie d’Apollon, were destroyed in the fire of 1661, and his decorations at Fontainebleau have also disappeared without trace. From the series of compositions at Saint-Germain-en-Laye six survive while others are known from copies and drawings; and further several tapestries of the history of Diana are known from his designs. In these his manner is based primarily on Primaticcio. Dubreuil forms a link between Primaticcio and the classicism of Poussin in the following century.

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Hyanthe and Clymene at their Toilette

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