André Beauneveu

[1] As with all northern European artists of this period, reliable biographical information about Beauneveu is extremely sparse, being mainly limited to a few mentions in the financial accounts of his patrons.

The earliest documentary reference to "Master Andrew the Painter" (assumed to be Beauneveu) appears in the accounts of Duchess Yolande de Bar in 1359, where he is recorded as working on the decoration of a chapel in her castle at Nieppe (destroyed).

In 1386 he made the move to Bourges to enter the service of one of the greatest artistic patrons of medieval Europe, the Valois Duke Jean de Berry.

The style of the miniatures clearly show the influence of Jean Pucelle, whose most famous work, the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, was in the possession of the Duc de Berry by this time.

This lifelike figure, with her gently curving pose, naturalistic features and direct gaze, gives a clear sense of the elegance that Froissart and his contemporaries so admired in Beauneveu's work.

During his time in the employ of Jean de Berry (after 1386), Beauneveu is known to have produced several sculptures for the castle at Mehun and for the chapel of the ducal palace at Bourges.

The English bibliophile S.C. Cockerell even claimed that Beauneveu had painted the famous 'Westminster' portrait of Richard II, based on a supposed similarity between that work and the Berry Psalter.

[7] For a period, Beauneveu's supposed oeuvre was a pawn in the gentlemanly disputes (played out in the pages of the Burlington Magazine) between Cockerell, Martin Conway and Roger Fry over the origins of the French, Netherlandish and English 'schools' of late medieval art.

The fact that all these speculative attributions have since been dismissed in the light of more careful scholarship[citation needed] shows the dangers of trying to apply traditional techniques of connoisseurship to the art of this period.