Cousin, Jean (Senior)

The circumstances of his life are little known. Initially, he was engaged in painting on glass and decorated it with the windows of the Cathedral of Sanya, the choir in the church of St. Hervasius, in Paris , and the Church of the Virgin in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. These and some other works of the same kind attributed to Cousin are not without a noble style and show the author’s advanced technique. Of his few authentic paintings painted with oil paints, the Last Judgment (in the Louvre , Paris) is the most curious - a colorful, intricate composition, remarkable, however, for the thoroughness of its decoration and warmth of color, and “Eva prima Pandora” (in the Louvre, in Paris) - the figure of a naked lying woman in which the artist, wanting to show his acquaintance with anatomy, went into exaggeration and tastelessness. In general, these paintings were painted under Dutch influence.

Cousin's sculptural works (several portrait figures for tombstones and bas-reliefs) are not equally valuable, which can be noted about his engravings and other works, which, however, were mostly executed not by himself, but by others, according to his drawings. In 1560 he published a treatise on perspective and in 1571 an essay on the proportions of the human body and on the ways of its image in different positions and angles ("La vraie science de la pourtraicture etc.").

Jean Cousin was often compared to his great contemporary Albrecht Dürer . His son, Jean Cousin the Younger , also a well-known artist and author of the famous book "Guide to Portraiture", studied with his father to become an artist, discovered great talent and quickly reached the level of his father. Sometimes the work of father and son cannot even be distinguished by specialists.

• Cousin, Jean // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.