Saint James the Less

1631 · Print

Particulars

1621–1635 · Workplace
Nancy
1629–1630
Declines to serve Louis XIII
King Louis XIII of France offers Callot a place at his court, but the artist declines; by one account, as a patriot of Lorraine he could not forgive the king for the devastation of his homeland by French troops.
1629–1630
Lives and works in Paris
From 1629 Callot lives and works in Paris, where his clients include publishers, mostly Parisian; overall he is commissioned by the courts of Lorraine, France and Spain.
c. 1630
Meets Abraham Bosse
The meeting of the Parisian Abraham Bosse with Callot around 1630 makes Bosse his follower: he will later spread the master’s technical innovations across Europe in the first published manual of etching, translated into several languages.
1633
The French invasion of Lorraine
In the year the large series of the “Miseries of War” is published, Lorraine is invaded by the French during the Thirty Years’ War; Callot’s etchings of pillaging, executions and the lot of crippled beggars are counted among the most powerful artistic statements of the inhumanity of war and will later inspire Goya.