L'ESTIN, Jacques de - b. 1597 Troyes, d. 1661 Troyes

French painter whose career can be traced in some detail. His early life was spent in his native Troyes. By 1622 he was in Rome, where he remained for about four years. In 1626 he was back in Troyes, and the following year he received commissions for pictures for the Troyes Cathedral, which no longer survive. In 1634 he moved to Paris, where he executed in 1636 a ‘May’ for Notre Dame, which was an annual commission for the cathedral. Three years later he again returned to Troyes, where he seems to have spent most of the rest of his career.

Both in style and accomplishment, L’Estin was close to his near contemporary Guy François in Le Puy. In Rome in their impressionable youth, both painters rapidly assimilated the popular style, and both were incapable in their maturity of developing this style in their native province. L’Estin was still painting in the Baroque manner, which had been fashionable in 1630 under the dominance of Vouet, thirty years after it had gone out of date. His stylish self-portrait at Troyes shows him to have had an affinity with Vouet, whom he would have known in Rome. Most of L’Estin surviving pictures are in the churches of the Troyes region for which they were originally painted.

Self-portrait

On the northern edge of Burgundy, but actually in Champagne, stood the medieval city of Troyes, where the Rome-trained Jacques de L’Estin worked. After painting, probably in Rome, his self-portrait, now in the Mus�e des Beaux-Arts in Troyes, his art continued in a much lighter vein, with plenty of light colour and swirling composition. De L’Estin is a rare example of a painter working in the provinces who kept himself up to date without degenerating into provincial naivety, and some of his pictures have been confused with the work of far greater artists.

Self-portraits are rare for most French seventeenth-century artists. This one shows the influence of Simon Vouet.