Cardinal de Richelieu

In 1793 revolutionary officials seized this portrait at the château of Anet, west of Paris. It belonged to the Duke of Penthièvre, a grandson of Louis XIV, and he had died that March. It had probably come from the Hôtel de Toulouse, the family's town house in Paris. In 1798 it entered the Louvre. Champaigne painted it in the late 1630s, when Richelieu was running France as chief minister to Louis XIII, and the museum counts it among the most majestic images of the cardinal, close in pose to versions in London and at the Sorbonne. The canvas you see is a little larger than the one Champaigne painted. When it was relined in the 19th century, strips were added, about 20 centimetres at the top and five on each side.