Frans Pourbus the Younger

Frans Pourbus the Younger made his living painting the faces of power. Trained in Antwerp into a family of painters, he first worked for the Habsburg archdukes who governed the Spanish Netherlands from Brussels. Then in 1600 Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, met him while touring the Low Countries to buy art, and took him to Italy as court painter.

Nine years later Marie de' Medici, the Florentine-born queen of France, drew him to Paris, where he became her official portraitist and worked at the court of Henry IV and, after the king's murder in 1610, the boy king Louis XIII. His speciality was the full-length state portrait, the sitter fixed in costly cloth, every thread of lace and every jewel counted out.

That cool, exact and grand formula set the pattern European courts would copy for a generation. He died in Paris in 1622, still the queen's painter.