Eustache Le Sueur

In Paris in the 1640s, a young painter who had never crossed the Alps was being called the French Raphael. Eustache Le Sueur learned the Italian master entirely from engravings and from his own teacher Simon Vouet, absorbing Raphael's calm balance without ever standing in front of a single one of his frescoes.

His great commission came from the Carthusian monks of the Paris Charterhouse: a cycle of 22 paintings on the life of Saint Bruno, the order's founder, meant for their cloister. The scenes are hushed and grave, full of kneeling monks in white, and they carried his name for centuries. In 1648 he became one of the twelve founding elders of the new Académie Royale, the royal painting academy that would shape French art for generations.

He died in 1655, not yet forty, just as Charles Le Brun was rising to dominate that same academy and push Le Sueur's quieter manner aside. The Saint Bruno series now hangs in the Louvre, its once-white habits darkened by time and old restoration, the monks still bent in the same grey silence he gave them.