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Museum Acquires Rare 16th-Century Painting from School of Fontainebleau

Through the generosity of Edwin and Adrianne Joseph, a major 16th-century French painting is now part of the Museum’s collection. Temperance was produced around 1560 by an unknown painter working in the atelier of Italian and French artists assembled by King Francis I and run by the painter Francesco Primaticcio at the royal palace of Fontainebleau, some 40 miles southeast of Paris. The School of Fontainebleau gave rise to the most important group of painters in 16th-century France. Reflecting the refined Italian mannerist style that prevailed at the School of Fontainebleau, the painting depicts the cardinal virtue of Temperance personified as an elegant seated female figure pouring water from a pitcher into a shallow bowl filled with wine. Only a handful of paintings produced at Fontainebleau in the 16th century have survived, and Temperance is one of the most beautiful of that rare genre and was recently featured in an important exhibition at the Louvre.

Italian, ca. 1503-1570
Temperance, ca. 1560
Gift of Edwin and Adrainne Joseph

The painting will be on view this summer in the Museum’s Northern Renaissance Gallery, alongside two other works previously donated by the Josephs, the Master of Lucretia’s Adam and Eve and Dirck Barendsz’s Portrait of a Man.

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