Charles-Andre van Loo Giclée Fine Art Prints 1 of 2

A single insult survives him better than most of his pictures: "vanlotter", a verb coined among the followers of Jacques-Louis David for painting that was slick, decorative and too eager to please. The target was Charles-André van Loo (15 February 1705 - 15 July 1765), a French painter who had died barely a generation earlier as the most garlanded artist in Europe. He was born in Nice, then a Savoyard town rather than a French one, and he became the most illustrious member of a painting dynasty of Dutch origin. Religion, mythology, history, allegory, portraiture, genre scenes: he took on every category his century recognised.

His grandfather was Jacob van Loo, a portraitist who had left Amsterdam for Paris; his father, Louis-Abraham van Loo, kept the trade alive. The practical training, though, came from a much older brother. Jean-Baptiste van Loo took the boy with him to Turin and then, in 1712, to Rome, where he was set to study with Benedetto Luti and to work near the sculptor Pierre Le Gros the Younger. It was an unusual pairing and a useful one. From Luti came a soft Roman handling of colour; from Le Gros, an appetite for sculptural clarity in the modelling of an arm or a shoulder. Both remained visible in his work half a century later.

By 1723 he had left Italy and was enrolled at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris, taking first prize for drawing that same year. The Prix de Rome followed in 1724, awarded for Jacob Purifying His House Before Departing for Bethel. In 1727 he carried off the first prize for history painting - and so, in the same competition, did François Boucher, whose career would shadow and sharpen his own for the next four decades.

Rome received him again as a pensionnaire from 1728. Nicolas Vleughels, then directing the French Academy there, was struck by the speed and assurance of his execution, and Cardinal Melchior de Polignac, the French ambassador, opened the necessary doors: a state pension, and Roman church commissions rarely granted to a foreign student, including an illusionistic ceiling for San Isidoro. Aeneas Carrying Anchises, painted in 1729 and now in the Louvre, belongs to these years. In it we see a young painter measuring himself against the antique. The old man's slack musculature is set against his son's braced torso, and the whole group turns on a single spiralling axis borrowed from Bernini.

Leaving Rome in 1732 with the intention of returning to France, he got no further than Turin, halted there by a death in the family, and stayed. He married the soprano Christina Somis, daughter of a court musician close to the House of Savoy; their Paris household would later become one of the more musical salons in the city. Charles Emmanuel III put him to work at once - a ceiling at the hunting lodge of Stupinigi, the decoration of a salon in the royal palace, and a cycle of subjects drawn from Torquato Tasso. When the War of the Polish Succession broke out, van Loo turned north. He reached Paris in 1734.

Acceptance by the Académie came that August, full membership in July 1735, with Apollo Flaying Marsyas as his reception piece: a subject of exposed nerve and courtly cruelty, delivered with impeccable finish. Promotion was rapid - assistant professor in 1736, professor in 1737. In that same year he supplied five history paintings for the Hôtel de Soubise, among them Castor and Pollux, and a large Halt of the Hunt was set into the panelling of Louis XV's dining room at Fontainebleau. The hunting picture is the more revealing commission. Watteau's fêtes galantes stand behind it, but the mood has shifted from reverie to reportage: a court at leisure, observed with a sharp eye for the cut of a coat and the glint of silver on a picnic cloth.

Work multiplied through the 1740s and 1750s, and it came from every quarter. Between 1746 and 1755 he painted seven canvases on the life of Saint Augustine for the choir of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires in Paris. For the Gobelins Manufactory he designed tapestry cartoons, including Theseus Overcoming the Minotaur of 1746. He portrayed Queen Marie Leszczyńska in 1747. And for Madame de Pompadour, his most attentive patron, he produced the turqueries that carried his name furthest - A Sultana Taking Coffee and Two Odalisques Embroidering among them, made for the Turkish bedroom at her château of Bellevue, where the marquise appears in silks and turban, sovereign of a harem of her own devising.

Honours then accumulated with almost bureaucratic regularity. In April 1749 he became the first governor of the École royale des élèves protégés, the finishing school established for Prix de Rome laureates. Ennobled and made a chevalier of the Order of Saint Michael in 1751, he was elected rector of the Académie in 1754, appointed Premier peintre du Roi in June 1762, and made director of the Académie the following year. His Sacrifice of Iphigenia of 1757 drew a long, admiring description from the comte de Caylus in the Mercure de France. Mademoiselle Clairon as Medea, shown at the Salon of 1759, remains his most theatrical portrait: the tragedienne caught mid-gesture, dagger raised, impasto thickening in the highlights of the whipped drapery. A short visit to London followed in 1764. He died in Paris on 15 July 1765, at the summit.

Melchior Grimm called him the first painter of Europe; Voltaire set him beside Raphael. Such verdicts now read as a court applauding its own taste, and the reaction was correspondingly severe. Neoclassicism wanted moral gravity, and van Loo offered accomplishment. Yet accomplishment is not nothing, and the collapse of his reputation says as much about the nineteenth century as about him. Perhaps fluency was the trap - a hand so obedient that it seldom had to struggle, and struggle is what later ages learned to read as sincerity.

Rehabilitation, when it came, was quiet. A retrospective at the Musée Chéret in Nice in 1977, with a catalogue by Pierre Rosenberg and Marie-Catherine Sahut, restored the outline of an artist who had been reduced to a byword. His Marriage of the Virgin hangs in the Louvre; the Hermitage, Versailles, Sanssouci and the Metropolitan Museum of Art hold others. What Charles-André van Loo offers a present-day viewer is not a private vision but something rarer and more documentary: a complete account of what a European court expected painting to do around 1750, together with the full technical means of doing it. That is a modest claim and a durable one. Van Loo painted the surface of his age, and he was unusually honest about its being a surface.