The Provost of the Merchants and the Aldermen of the City of Paris

Paris had a custom of honouring its city magistrates with a group portrait for the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall, and pictures of this kind followed set rules. The men kneel in two groups facing each other, left and right, around something sacred in the middle. Around 1648 Champaigne kept to the formula. At the centre stands a pedestal with the arms of Paris and a figure of Saint Genevieve, the city's patron saint, holding up Christ on the cross. On the left kneels the provost of the merchants, Jérôme Le Féron, head of the city government, with the king's procurator, the clerk and the receiver. On the right are the four aldermen, among them a doctor of medicine, Jean de Bourges. Le Féron held office from 1646 to 1650, so it was under him that Paris barricaded its streets in August 1648, at the start of the civil wars known as the Fronde. Around 1800 the canvas left the Hôtel de Ville for the state depot of confiscated art in the former convent of the Petits-Augustins. That move kept it out of the building in May 1871, when the Hôtel de Ville burned during the Commune and much of what it held was lost.