Sébastien Bourdon

Sébastien Bourdon could paint in almost anyone's manner. Trained in a France pulled between Italian grandeur and Dutch realism, he moved easily from small crowded scenes of beggars and soldiers in the Roman street style to lofty classical compositions close to Poussin, the great French painter of ordered history subjects. People admired the skill and were never quite sure what a Bourdon was supposed to look like.

Born in Montpellier in 1616 into a Protestant family, he spent restless early years that included a spell in Rome. In 1648 he became one of the twelve founding members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, the new royal art academy in Paris. He returned to the city for good after his years abroad and died there in 1671.

Those years abroad were the most unexpected turn. In 1652 Queen Christina of Sweden made him her first court painter in Stockholm, and among the works of that time is an equestrian portrait of the scholarly queen, painted only a year or two before she astonished Europe by giving up her throne.