The Cathedral Pictures
Lubin Baugin certainly received not one but a series of commissions for the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Thanks to various inventories and notes, we know that eight canvases decorated the main chapels, with an additional eleven compositions displayed in less accessible rooms. Going by current knowledge, Jacques Thuillier places them between 1645 and 1655. As for the origin of the commission, he notes that a monk at the cathedral of Paris, Nicolas Pfaiel, was a close friend of the artist because he was godfather to Baugin's son Nicolas, baptised on 28 June 1641. Maybe he introduced Baugin to his colleagues at Notre-Dame? No records have been found as yet to explain how the artist received these commissions or on what conditions.
Nowadays there are only five large pictures known to be still in existence. La Vierge de Pitié, also known as Le Christ mort sur les genoux de la Vierge, was noted by Gueffier in 1763 in the Chapel of Saint-Geoges-et-Saint-Blaise and now hangs in the second chapel on the left-hand side of the nave of Notre-Dame. The Vierge à l'Enfant avec saint Jean-Baptiste et sainte Geneviève, reported to be in the Chapel of Sainte-Geneviève, has been discovered in the sacristy of the new church of Saint-François-Xavier in Paris. Le Christ en croix, one of Baugin's masterpieces, was placed in the three chapels of Saint-Jacques, Saint-Crépin-et-Crépinien and Saint-Etienne when they were combined into one. It has now been located in the sacristy of the evangelical Lutheran church of the Billettes in Paris, but no-one knows how it got there. Le Martyre de saint Barthélemy was seized during the Revolution and then sent to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, who returned it to Notre-Dame de Paris in around 1958. In this work, the composition centres round a very beautiful male nude. Perfect in proportion and painted from nature, it is evidence of Baugin's work in this field: he ran an academy where he paid models to pose in the workshop. This practice was still rare in France but was adopted by the Royal Academy as part of its free instruction. There is another large nude in a picture which appears to be the pair of Le Martyre de saint-Barthélemy, Le Martyre de saint Laurent. Amongst the works which unfortunately have still not been found, but were described in 1763 by Gueffier, are Sainte Marie l'Egyptienne recevant la communion des mains de saint Zonime (at that time in the chapel of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre et Sainte-Marie-L'Egyptienne), La Résurrection and L'Ascension. Four grisailles and five decorative pictures inlaid in a wardrobe have almost certainly been lost forever.
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