The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (107 page)

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SUPERREALISM
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Clouet
.

A family of painters descended from
Jean Clouet
(or
Jan Cloet
)
the Elder
(b.
c.
1420), a Fleming who came to France
c.
1460. Almost nothing is known for certain of his life and works. The more famous
Jean Clouet
(d. 1540/1) is thought to have been his son. He was celebrated in his lifetime, but no documented works survive. A handful of portraits, however, including
Man holding Petrarch's Works
(Royal Coll., Windsor), and a number of drawings (mainly in the Musée Condé, Chantilly) are attributed to him on fairly strong circumstantial evidence. The paintings belong to the school of Flemish
naturalism
that dominated French portraiture at this time, but the drawings are more personal and often of very high quality. They have often been compared to those of Clouet's contemporary Hans
Holbein
the Younger, with which they share a keenness of observation; whereas Holbein's drawings are overwhelmingly linear, however, Clouet's are subtly modelled in light and shade with a delicate system of
hatching
that recalls
Leonardo
, whose work he could well have known. Jean's son,
François
(
c.
1510–72), succeeded him as court painter in 1541. His work is somewhat better documented than his father's, but his career is still very obscure (they used the same nickname, ‘Janet’, which has caused much confusion, and one of the finest works attributed to him, the celebrated portrait of Francis I in the Louvre, showing the king in a lavish gold doublet, has also been given to Jean). François, too, was mainly a portraitist, his signed works including
Pierre Quthe
(Louvre, Paris, 1562), much more Italianate than any of his father's paintings, and
Lady in Her Bath
(NG, Washington,
c.
1570). This mysterious and captivating work has been traditionally identified as representing Diane de Poitiers, but it is more probably a likeness of Marie Touchet, mistress of Charles IX. A number of drawings, mostly in the Musée Condé, are also attributed to him.

 
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(1498–1578).
Italian painter and
illuminator
, born in Croatia. He went to Rome in 1516 and spent most of the rest of his career there, though with frequent breaks when he worked in other cities. In his illuminations he made frequent use of motifs from the work of
Michelangelo
and
Raphael
, adapting the fashionable
Mannerist
style to a miniature scale. Amongst them is the
Towneley Lectionary
(New York Public Library). He also did some work in oils (
Pietà
, Uffizi, Florence, 1553). Clovio enjoyed a very high reputation in his lifetime.
Bruegel
worked with him when he visited Rome and El
Greco
painted his portrait (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples).

 
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Coade stone
.

An artificial stone manufactured in London in the late 18th and early 19th cents., used for figure sculpture, monuments, architectural dressings, and decorative work. Essentially a type of clay, fired in a kiln at high temperature, it was named after Mrs Eleanor Coade (d. 1821), who set up in business in Lambeth in 1769. She claimed that it resisted frost and therefore retained sharpness of outline better than natural stone, and time has proved her right. It was mixed into a kind of paste and formed into the required shape with moulds, so popular designs could be more or less mass produced. The business was an immediate success; Robert Adam was one of the notable architects who used the material and several good sculptors, particularly John
Bacon
the Elder, worked for the firm. Monuments made of Coade stone exist in many English churches, and some garden sculpture remains. Mrs Coade's successor in the business, her distant relative William Croggon , went bankrupt in 1833 and Coade stone abruptly vanished from the market.

 
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Cobra
.

A group of
Expressionist
painters formed in Paris in 1948 by a number of Netherlandish and Scandinavian artists. The name derived from the first letters of the capital cities of the three countries of the artists involved—Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The Dane Asgar
Jorn
, the Dutchman Karel
Appel
, and the Belgian
Corneille
were the leading members. Their aims were to exploit free expression of the subconscious, unimpeded and undirected by the intellect. In their emphasis upon unconscious gesture the group had affinities with American
Action painting
, but they tended to put more emphasis upon the development of strange and fantastic imagery, related in some cases to Nordic mythology and folklore, in others to various magical or mystical symbols of the subconscious. Their approach was similar to the exponents of
Art Informel
, but was more savage and vigorously expressive. The group arranged Cobra exhibitions at Copenhagen (1948), Amsterdam (1949), and Liège (1951), before disbanding in 1951.

 
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