Philippe de Champaigne

Philippe de Champaigne was a Flemish-born painter who became the grave, exact portraitist of France's ruling men. He painted Cardinal Richelieu, the power behind Louis XIII, more than once, including a famous study showing the cardinal's head from three angles at once, made to guide a sculptor.

In middle life he drew close to Port-Royal, the austere Jansenist community whose stern Catholicism valued plainness and inwardness. His art grew quieter and more severe to match, stripped of Baroque display, the sitters set against dark grounds with an unsettling honesty.

Out of that world came his strangest and most personal picture. In 1662 his daughter, a nun at Port-Royal, was reported cured of a paralysis after prayer, and Champaigne painted her and the prioress in silent thanks, an ex-voto with a long inscription recording the event. He kept the picture in his own house for the rest of his life, and died in Paris in 1674.