Portrait of Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins

Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins was chancellor of France under Charles the Seventh, the king who, with Joan of Arc's help, had turned the long war against England back in France's favour. By about 1460, when Jean Fouquet painted him, that Hundred Years' War was finally over and the country was rebuilding. Fouquet, the leading French painter of his century, shows the chancellor as a heavy, sober man in fur-lined robes, hands joined, set against a wall of gilded carving that carries his family's coat of arms. Fouquet had travelled to Italy and brought its new ornament home, and here it frames a thoroughly French statesman. The panel is one of the earliest surviving French painted portraits, and it still holds the exact, unflattering likeness of a working minister of state.