Portrait of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

In 1698 Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, was the most powerful voice in the French church, a preacher whose funeral orations are still read and the man chosen to tutor the king's heir. That same year he was locked in a bitter public quarrel with a fellow bishop, Fénelon, over a strain of mystical devotion called Quietism that Bossuet was determined to stamp out. Rigaud recorded him here as a bust, head and shoulders only, and this was the first time he set down the bishop's features. Some years later he reused that face for the towering full-length portrait now in the Louvre, the image by which Bossuet is usually remembered. The Florentine canvas is the quieter first take, a little over 70 centimetres tall, showing the churchman past 70, near the end of a long fight he mostly won.