Mutter Catherine-Agnès Arnauld und Schwester Catherine de Sainte-Suzanne de Champaigne

In 1662 Philippe de Champaigne painted this as a private thank-offering. His only surviving daughter, Catherine, was a nun at the convent of Port-Royal near Paris, and for 14 months she had been feverish and half-paralysed, beyond the help of the era's medicine. The Mother Superior, Agnes Arnauld, began a novena of prayers, and Catherine slowly regained the use of her body. Champaigne shows the two women at the moment hope arrives, a single shaft of light falling not on his cured daughter but on the praying Mother Superior. He gave the painting to the convent with a Latin inscription recounting the cure. Port-Royal was a stronghold of the Jansenists, then under pressure from both church and crown.