Valentin Valleron de Perrochel

Twice in the 19th century this portrait was sold in France as a likeness of Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, the courtier and translator who withdrew to the convent of Port-Royal in 1646 and whom Philippe de Champaigne painted in old age. In 1850 it went under that name in the sale of the collection of the Comte Despinoy, a retired general, held at his house in Versailles. It then belonged to the Marquis de Biencourt at the château of Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire valley, and when that collection was sold in Paris in 1901 it was again catalogued as Arnauld d'Andilly. The museum now names the sitter as Valentin Valleron de Perrochel, a man about whom little has been published, and it keeps the cautious label attributed to Champaigne. The date at least is on the canvas. On the stone ledge at the lower right is painted the letter A with the year 1647. A cousin of Pierre de Chaignon la Rose, a collector in Cambridge, Massachusetts, bought it in Paris, and la Rose sold it in 1905 to the Boston collector Denman Waldo Ross, who gave it to the museum the next year.