Musées de Langres – Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot – Musée d'Art et d'Histoire

The works of Jean III Michelin are little known. This is partly because there were several painters of the same name: he was born in Langres in 1623, in a family of painters, several generations of whom shared the same first name. He travelled to Rome in 1650 and was admitted to the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1660. A Protestant, he left Paris in 1681 for the Court of Hanover in Germany. Like the Parisian painters Antoine, Louis and Mathieu Le Nain, Michelin painted religious scenes and scenes of everyday life (peasant interiors, markets, inns, etc.) but his works are distinctive for their stylistic naivety and sincerity. The clothes are those of seventeenth-century peasants and there is great attention to realistic details. However, the composition is somewhat clumsy, and the characters are rather stiff, with frozen facial expressions. They look isolated, as though disconnected from each other. Michelin painted several versions of the Adoration of the Shepherds, all of them with the Holy Infant at the centre of a circle of onlookers.