Portrait of Marie de' Medici, Queen of France

Pourbus signed and dated this one at the lower left, FPF 1611. Marie de' Medici was 36 that year and in the first full year of her regency: her husband had been murdered the previous May, her son Louis XIII was nine, and she was governing France in his name. She did not let the job go. Her mandate lapsed when the boy came of age in 1614 and she held on until a coup removed her in 1617. The quarrel that followed, with her son and with Cardinal Richelieu, came to a head in November 1630, when she tried to have the cardinal dismissed and lost. She left France in July 1631, moved between Brussels and London for a decade, and died at Cologne in July 1642 without ever going back.