Charles Le Brun

and

The Chancellor Séguier on Horseback

Kehinde Wiley

Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) was responsible for the production of paintings, sculpture, and decorative objects commissioned by the French government during the reign of Louis XIV. The monarch had extravagant tastes and favored artists whose work reflected the opulence of the period. Although known as a fine portrait painter, Le Brun preferred a narrative style, believing that a painting told a story through symbols, costumes, and gestures—as in the one shown here depicting Pierre Séguier, Duke of Villemor, the Lord Chief Justice of France. He and his entourage are shown entering Paris in August 1660 to celebrate the marriage of Louis XIV and his wife, Maria Theresa, daughter of the king of Spain. Those shown would be counselors, treasurers, secretaries, court ushers, and the like who took part in the procession.

Kehinde Wiley was born in 1977 in Los Angeles, lives in New York City, and maintains studios in several cities worldwide, including Beijing and Dakar. He holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Yale. Wiley is a photorealist painter whose work is inspired by traditional portraitists, such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Titian, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Walker Art Center, the Miami Art Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. To create paintings such as this one, Wiley often seeks out average African American men and asks them to select a painting from one of the old masters such as Titian or Ingres. Then they strike a pose from one of those paintings. In an interview with Art in America, Wiley said of his work, “Black masculinity has been codified in a fixed way. I’m not trying to provide a direct corrective, but . . . there is a certain desire in my work to tie the urban street and the way it’s been depicted with elements that are not necessarily coded as masculine.”