Portrait of Alain de Coëtivy (1407–1474)

Fouquet was a very important painter of the 15th century, responsible for introducing the Italian Renaissance into French painting. Little is known of him or his career, therefore his corpus of works has been established on the basis of stylistic criteria, but its exact chronology is uncertain. The earliest known work attributed to Fouquet is the painted portrait, now in Vienna; it dates from ca. 1440, the date having been confirmed by dendrochronological analysis. Fouquet is documented in Rome between 1446 and 1448. He was apparently not active after 1479, and he is known to have been dead by 8 November 1481.