Triple Portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu

He was the chief minister of King Louis XIII from 1624, and he was created duc de Richelieu in 1629.

The grey-haired cardinal, aged nearly 60, wears a scarlet liturgical skullcap and cape (possibly a zucchetto and mozzetta).

Under the broad collar of a white shirt, tied at the neck with a trailing string, he wears the characteristic blue ribbon of the Order of the Holy Spirit (the origin of the term "cordon bleu") from which hangs the Maltese cross of the Order as a pectoral cross.

It was made in Paris by Champaigne's workshop after his now dismembered Portrait of Cardinal Richelieu (from which only the right profile is left) as a study to be sent to Rome, where the Italian sculptor Francesco Mochi had been commissioned to make a statue (now lost) for the Château de La Meilleraye near Beaulieu-sous-Parthenay in Poitou.

The painting was donated to the National Gallery, London in 1869 by the English antiquary and museum administrator Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks.