Portrait of Fréderic Maurice de la Tour d'Auvergne (1605-1652)

Frédéric Maurice de la Tour d'Auvergne (1605–1652), Duke of Bouillon, was a French Protestant nobleman of the great Huguenot military dynasty — his family were rulers of the principality of Sedan, an important Protestant stronghold on the French-Spanish border. Painted in 1626 at age twenty-one, this portrait captures him near the beginning of a career that would see him involved in numerous wars and diplomatic intrigues across Europe. The Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht — a city with deep historical connections to both French and Dutch culture — is an appropriate home for a portrait of a French Protestant nobleman painted by the Dutch Republic's leading portraitist. The 1626 date falls during the period of French Huguenot resistance to Richelieu's policy of reducing the political and military autonomy of the Protestant community, making this portrait a political statement as much as a personal commemoration.

The panel support is Mierevelt's preferred medium for detailed portraiture. The young sitter — twenty-one in 1626 — presents a very different physiognomy from the weathered older men who dominate Mierevelt's civic portrait output: smoother skin, less defined features, the face of a young aristocrat rather than a seasoned merchant. The fashionable French aristocratic costume of 1626 provides Mierevelt with different textile conventions than his Dutch subjects typically wore.