Simon Vouet

In 1627 Louis XIII called a French painter home from Italy, and French painting was not quite the same afterward. Simon Vouet had spent nearly 15 years in Rome, absorbing the warm colour and confident drama of the Italian Baroque, and had risen high enough to be elected head of Rome's painters' academy.

Back in Paris as the king's first painter, he brought that Italian manner with him and set the tone for a generation. He decorated royal and noble residences with bright, graceful, large-scale schemes, and he ran a big teaching studio that shaped nearly every important French painter of the next wave.

Some of those pupils, Charles Le Brun above all, eventually outgrew and eclipsed him, taking over the decoration of the age of Louis XIV. Vouet died in Paris in 1649, by then wealthy and honoured, having trained many of the men who would go on to decorate Versailles.