Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591–1632)
Oil on canvas
50 1/2 x 39 in. (128.3 x 99.1 cm)
Purchase, Walter and Leonore Annenberg Acquisitions Endowment Fund, Acquisitions Fund, James and Diane Burke and Mr. and Mrs. Mark Fisch Gifts, Rogers Fund, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 2008 (2008.459)
Valentin was the greatest French follower of Caravaggio and one of the outstanding artists in seventeenth-century Rome, where he spent his entire career. His most frequent subjects are scenes of merriment, with music making, drinking, and fortune-telling: stock Caravaggesque themes, but painted with a directness and vividness for which the only parallel is in the early work of Velázquez. Valentin died relatively young, at the peak of his fame, leaving few works.
This picture, showing a soldier of fortune singing a love madrigal, is unique in Valentin's career. It is perhaps emblematic of the sobriquet he took when, in 1624, he joined the society of foreign artists in Rome known as the bentveughels (birds of a feather): Amador, Spanish for "lover-boy." It belonged to the prestigious collection of Cardinal Mazarin, minister to Louis XIV and one of the great collectors of the seventeenth century.
