Antoine Coypel

Antoine Coypel was an accomplished French painter in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. He was the director of the prestigious French art academy that he once attended and was also appointed “first painter to the king” during France’s Ancien Regime. Despite learning painting from his father, Noël Coypel, he looked instead to Peter Paul Rubens for inspiration. It is rare for a painter’s child and student to both deviate from their parent’s style and embrace a foreign visual language instead. But, as a result of this, Coypel’s paintings created better illusions of space through interacting vibrant colors—a truly meticulous color-theory science. His Baroque paintings cover the ceiling of Versailles’ royal chapel, as well as the walls of the Palais-Royal. An educated lover of literature, many of his paintings depict scenes from classic stories such as The Aeneid, Greek mythology, and the Old Testament.