a copy based on the famous portrait of Henry IV by Frans Pourbus the Younger

Following his entry into Paris in 1594, Henry IV commissioned portraits of himself in order to demonstrate the reality of his power. The king was in his forties; his face was gaunt despite his white beard, and his nose was ‘Bourbon-like’. Henry IV was a man of war and initially intended to emphasise this through commissioned engravings depicting him in armour, often wearing the white sash – the distinctive symbol of the Protestants, as the Catholics had adopted red – during the Wars of Religion.

Towards the end of his reign, Henry IV wished to project the image of a peaceful king. Armour gave way to court dress, often proudly displaying the Order of the Holy Spirit, an order created in 1578 by Henry III to unite the nobility—divided by the Wars of Religion—around the throne. In everyday life, knights were required to wear the Order’s cross suspended from a ‘celestial blue silk ribbon’. Henry III chose the Maltese cross as the Order’s general emblem, something no founder of a chivalric order had ever done before.

From the reign of Henry IV onwards, the sons of France were presented with the blue cord at their christening or baptism, as was the future Louis XIII in 1601.  Henry IV also allowed a small number of foreigners – monarchs and great lords of the Catholic faith – to join the Order.

Frans Pourbus II, known as ‘the Younger’, was born in Antwerp around 1569–1570. He trained under his father, Frans I, known as ‘the Elder’, also a portrait painter, and his grandfather, Pieter Pourbus. He was part of the fully established Flemish realist tradition, capable of meeting the aspirations of the wealthy Antwerpers for social pre-eminence.

In 1591, he settled at the court of the Habsburg Archdukes in Brussels. This experience marked the beginning of his itinerant career, devoted almost exclusively to promoting the princely image. He drew inspiration from numerous artists, both Flemish and Spanish, including Willem Key, Jean de Namur, Antonis Mor and the Van Veens. Invited to the court of Mantua in 1599, he joined Peter Paul Rubens. On behalf of the Duke of Mantua, Pourbus travelled throughout Europe to create a ‘Gallery of Beautiful Women’. He visited, in particular, Innsbruck, Prague and Paris, where he painted portraits of Queen Marie de’ Medici and her son, the future Louis XIII. One of the masterpieces from this period is the Portrait of Eleonora de’ Medici, which shows the duchess in a half-length pose, sumptuously dressed, set against a background of crimson drapery.

Pourbus was already established as a cosmopolitan artist, a painter to several European courts, when he was summoned by Marie de’ Medici in late 1609 to become the court portraitist. He then developed the conventions of a ceremonial portrait that enriched the French tradition of the genre, whilst also drawing inspiration from François Clouet for the static nature of the poses. He is particularly known for his portraits of Henry IV, a new iconography of the kings of France, characterised by ‘the seizure of the regalia’, to use Blaise Ducos’s expression.

The workat the Château d’Aulteribe is a fairly well-executed copy based on the original portrait of Henry IV held at the Louvre and dated, albeit with some uncertainty, to 1610. The king is depicted full-length, wearing a black silk doublet and breeches of the same colour, with the Order of the Holy Spirit around his neck and a sword at his belt, in a room with a marble floor enclosed by a knotted green drapery. This work was widely copied in the^17th century and thereafter, as evidenced by other copies held at the Palace of Versailles and at Chantilly.

Blaise Ducos, Frans Pourbus the Younger, The Ceremonial Portrait at the Dawn of the Grand Siècle: Between the Habsburgs, the Medici and the Bourbons, Paris, Faton, 2011.