Portrait of Marie de' Medici

By the time Anthony van Dyck painted her in 1631, Marie de' Medici was a queen without a country. Mother of the French king Louis XIII, she had gambled everything on forcing out his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, lost, and fled north into the Spanish Netherlands, where Van Dyck was then working. He gives her the full apparatus of majesty, the heavy drapery and the steady gaze, for a woman who no longer had a court to command. She never returned to France. Marie died in Cologne in 1642, in reduced circumstances, in a house once linked to the family of the painter Rubens, whose great cycle celebrating her life she had commissioned in her better years.