They bring the personality of the cardinal vividly to life and show how Champaigne moderated the Baroque idiom of Rubens towards a classical dignity in line with French taste in the middle of the 17th century. He was a friend of Poussin, and Anthony Blunt has written that ‘His portraits and his later religious works are as true a reflection of the rationalism of French thought as the classical compositions of Poussin in the 1640s.’ His style became even more severe after he came under the influence of the Jansenists—a Catholic sect of great austerity—in the early 1640s. Some of his finest work was done for the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal, where his daughter was a nun: he commemorated her miraculous recovery from paralysis in his most celebrated work, the Ex-Voto de 1662 (Louvre, Paris), of which Blunt writes that ‘In its restraint and simplicity this painting is as typical of the Jansenist approach to a miracle as Bernini's “St Theresa” is of the Jesuit.’ His masterpiece in portraiture might well have been his self-portrait of 1668, which is lost, but is known through a copy by his nephew and pupil Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne (1631–81) in the Louvre and a superb engraving (1676) by Gerard Edelinck.