Saint John the Baptist or Christ the Good Shepherd

Guy François · 1570/90

Medium

Charcoal heightened with white gouache, on tan laid paper

Original size

20.9 × 14.1 cm (8 1/4 × 5 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

This luminous study in charcoal and white gouache holds its subject in a quiet, searching light — a figure whose identity the Art Institute of Chicago itself leaves deliberately open: Saint John the Baptist or Christ the Good Shepherd. Guy François was a French painter working in the early seventeenth century, based in Le Puy-en-Velay, whose religious works absorbed the dramatic shadow-play of Caravaggio without losing a certain gentle, introspective quality. This drawing reveals his technique at its most intimate — the tan paper doing half the tonal work, the white gouache lifting highlights with precision, the charcoal building form through patient, layered strokes. It is the kind of preparatory study that shows an artist thinking in real time, and it is rarer and more revealing than any finished canvas. The ambiguity of the title is not a gap in the record but a genuine curatorial acknowledgement: the figure's attributes and pose sit precisely on the boundary between two iconographies, a testament to François's deep fluency with the language of sacred imagery. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates this tender, meditative quality into a medium that honours the original's warmth and tonal depth — bringing a rarely-seen drawing from the Art Institute's collection into something you can live with every day.