Simon Vouet was a French painter.
Evidently precocious, at age fourteen he was sent to England to execute a portrait of a "Lady of quality." In 1611, he traveled in the retinue of the French ambassador to Constantinople to make a portrait of an unknown gentleman. The next year he was in Venice, and in 1614, supported by a pension from Louis XIII, he began a fourteen-year sojourn in Rome.
Italy offered the young Vouet, already distinguished as a portraitist.
Vouet's vigor and dynamism, penchant for glowing colors and decorative effects of drapery, sensuous surfaces of creamy textured paint and swift brushwork had already emerged in the teens as hallmarks of a personal style. He also executed important paintings for churches, including the Birth of the Virgin. In 1621 he worked in Genoa for about a year, touring the cities of northern Italy on his return trip. The election of Maffeo Barberini as Pope VIII, won Vouet the ultimate honor of an altarpiece commission for the new basilica of St. Peter's, the Adoration of the Cross. In the same year, Vouet was elected director of the artists' association in Rome, the Accademia di San Luca. In 1627 he returned to Paris, called back to France by Louis XIII.
Vouet was named First Painter to the King, lodged in the Louvre, and flooded with major commissions, a great many of which have been destroyed, lost, or dismantled and dispersed. For the queen mother, Marie de' Medici, Vouet worked on the decoration of the Luxembourg Palace , and later he was employed by Anne of Austria. For the king, he made tapestry cartoons, drew pastel portraits of the court, and contributed to the decoration of royal residences.
Vouet’s religious paintings of the early 1630 and the Madonna (1640) and the Diana (1637) illustrate his best-known style, characterized by soft, smooth, and idealized modeling, sensuousness of forms, use of bright colours, and a facile technique.
Though Vouet was productive and sought after by patrons until his health failed in 1648 and in 1649 he died.