L'Eminence Grise

The title is a nickname. Cardinal Richelieu, who ran France for Louis XIII, was addressed as His Eminence and dressed in cardinal's red. His closest adviser, François Leclerc du Tremblay, known as Father Joseph, was a Capuchin friar in the order's plain grey habit, and that habit gave him his name, the grey eminence. He handled much of the cardinal's diplomacy without holding high office himself, and the phrase has come to mean the power behind the throne. Gérôme shows him coming down the grand staircase of Richelieu's palace in Paris, the building known today as the Palais-Royal, his head buried in a book. On the way up, finely dressed courtiers sweep off their hats and bow deeply as he passes. He does not look at them. Gérôme painted it in 1873, and the Paris dealer Goupil first entered it in its stock book simply as Le Père Joseph. Within weeks it was sold to a New York collector, James Stebbins, who lent it back to Paris for the Salon of 1874. Thirty years later the museum bought it at an auction in New York for 16,000 dollars.