The Death of Saint Bruno

Saint Bruno, founder of the Carthusians, the order of monks who live largely in silence, died in a hermitage in Calabria on 6 October 1101, and the Louvre's full title keeps that date. This deathbed scene belongs to the cycle of his life that Eustache Le Sueur painted for the small cloister of the Paris Charterhouse between 1645 and 1648, probably with help from his brother-in-law Thomas Goussé. A Latin inscription over the cloister door recorded that the series of pictures there, nearly destroyed by age, had been renewed with new colours for the third time, in 1648. Le Sueur painted on wooden panels. In 1776 the monks gave the cycle to Louis XVI, and between 1778 and 1783 the restorer Jean-Louis Hacquin transferred each picture from wood to canvas, which is how this one survives today.