Philippe de Champaigne

He was known as one of the greatest portrait painters of 17th-century France. His art was based in an analytical study of appearances and on psychological truth. He was also one of the principal instigators of the Classical tendency and a founder-member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. He developed an interest in Jansenist thinking, typified by a severe plainness of style. His career overall is marked by a successful integration of foreign elements into French culture and as the representative of the most intellectual current of French painting, having developed from late Mannerism and moving into powerful Baroque images, influenced as much by the Flemish Rubens as by Vouet, and ending with an aesthetic vision of the world and of humanity. Flemish painter. (source: Getty ULAN)