In the early 1630s, the French artist Simon Vouet, recently named premier peintre to the court of Louis XIII, produced a series of pastel portraits, probably commissioned by the King himself. One of these drawings, now in the Louvre, depicts a man in a broad white collar who appears to be in his mid-thirties. He has a fringe and shoulder-length hair, heavy eyelids, a moustache and a short beard beneath his lower lip. Writing in the TLS three years ago, Alexander Marr claimed that the subject of this portrait is the philosopher René Descartes (March 13, 2015); if Marr is correct, then this would be a fine addition to the small number of authentic portraits of Descartes painted during his lifetime.
It is altogether fitting that the cover of Harold Cook's book The Young Descartes: Nobility, rumor, and war features this new and unfamiliar image of Descartes rather than the ubiquitous visage derived from Frans Hals's portrait completed many years later. For Cook wants to shake up our image of Descartes, to turn our attention from the familiar and to get us to think more deeply about just who this Frenchman who spent most of his adult life in the Netherlands really was and why he engaged in the projects he did.
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