Jésus chassant les marchands du Temple ("Jesus expelling the merchants from the Temple"), by Jean Jouvenet

[see note on Le repas chez Simon for biographical details].

In 1706, Jean Jouvenet exhibited four monumental paintings in the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs: Les marchands chassés du temple, La résurrection de Lazare, La pêche miraculeuse and Le repas chez Simon. Jouvenet was one of the most famous religious painters of his time.

The painting in the Château de Maisons is a smaller copy of the original in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. These versions were probably executed from the tapestry cartoons. Indeed, Louis XIV appreciated these works so much that he asked for them to be made into tapestries as well. The model was even used again in the mid-18th century to create new tapestries by the Manufacture Royale des Gobelins.

His powerful, demonstrative compositions were also widely disseminated through printmaking, ensuring the great success of his work with his contemporaries. The engraver Gaspard Duchange, a contemporary of Jouvenet, perhaps best rendered the painter's softness in the burin, delivering prints of Le Repas chez Simon and Jésus chassant les marchands du Temple. The other two paintings at St.-Martin-des-Champs are reproduced by the engraver Audran.

Jouvenet's art is based on precise, naturalistic drawing, particularly evident in the realism of the animals, but also in the rendering of the anatomical forms of the two figures in the sinister foreground. Although trained in the school of Poussin and Le Brun, Jean Jouvenet was not insensitive to color, as this painting shows. The intensity of the colors here is organized around the play of repeated contrasts between blues and reds. By following the line of blue notations, the entire painting is traversed, leading either to the distance, or to the tunics of the two men struggling with an ox.

Antoine Schnapper et Christine Gouzi, Jean Jouvenet 1644-1717 et la peinture d'histoire à Paris, Paris, Arthena, 2010.