Jean Clouet and his son François held the key to portraiture in sixteenth-century France. Yet despite their fame – and despite pioneering research in the early twentieth century – they remain little known and little studied today. Their lives are still shrouded in mystery though the faces they depict have great clarity and immediacy.

Their portraits, reproduced here in spectacular colour plates show, primarily, members of the Courts of Francis I and his successors, and are comparable to those made by Holbein at the Court of Henry VIII. Professor Jollet begins this book by discussing the status of portraits and portrait painters in sixteenth century France and analyses the importance of the ‘self image’ at the court of France. He sets the paintings and drawings of the Clouets into their European context, and traces the development of the ‘Clouet formula’ through the art of both father and son.