Portrait of Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné (1552–1630)

When Sarburgh painted this face in 1622, the sitter had most of a century of France's religious wars behind him. Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigne had served as a soldier and confidant of Henri of Navarre, the Protestant leader who became King Henri IV; when the king turned Catholic to hold the throne, d'Aubigne treated it as a betrayal and never softened. He put that anger into Les Tragiques, a long, violent poem about the slaughter of French Protestants. Condemned back home, he fled to Geneva around 1620, and the city consulted him on how to strengthen its walls. Sarburgh caught him here in that exile, an old fighter turned adviser, a few years before he died in Geneva in 1630.