Musée No:318.025
Musée No:318.025

Musée No:318.025

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La Duchessa 

Artist: Jacob Ferdinand Voet

Date:1670 - 1675

Jacob Ferdinand Voet (1639-1689) was a Flemish portrait painter. He had an international career that took him to Italy and France, where he made portraits for an elite clientele. Voet is regarded as one of the best and most fashionable portrait painters of the Late Baroque. He left his native Antwerp and travelled to Rome where he lived from 1663 to 1680. His skills as a portrait painter were much in demand at the Papal court, by the Roman aristocracy, by Christina, Queen of Sweden and by Englishmen and other Europeans visiting Rome on their Grand Tour. He created a series of 37 portraits of the most enchanting women of Rome, the 'Galleria delle Belle'. By 1680 he was banned from the city by Pope Innocent XI who was scandalized by the portraits of women with unseemly décolletés. Voet specialized in half-length portraits, in which all attention is concentrated on the subject, who emerges from a neutral, dark background. He seems to have an effortless accuracy and a fluid ease in his painting style. Between 1684 and 1686 he moved to Paris, was appointed as court painter and became portrait painter to political and military personalities.

This truly beautiful subject is Marie Anne Mancini, Duchesse de Bouillon (1649 – 1714). She was an Italian-French aristocrat and cultural patron, the youngest of the five famously beautiful and successful Mancini sisters, who were known at the court of King Louis XIV of France as the Mazarinettes, because their uncle was the king's chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. She is best known for her involvement in the famous Poison Affair, and as the patron of La Fontaine, the author of the famous Fables that French school children are still made to learn off by heart. Her father was a Roman baron, necromancer and astrologer. Her husband, Godefroy Maurice de La Tour d'Auvergne, the Duc de Bouillon, (love these names!) loved her and was tolerant of her love affairs, and refused to follow the wish of his family and have her incarcerated in a convent for adultery. They had 8 children. However, she was socially and politically compromised in the notorious Affaire des Poisons, allegedly for planning to poison her husband in order to marry her nephew Louis Joseph, Duc de Vendôme. The trial against her was conducted in January 1680, and she appeared escorted by her husband and her lover Vendôme, one on each side, and stated that she did not accept the authority of the court and had accepted to answer the court summon only out of respect for the king's rank. She was never formally convicted. She was greatly admired within the aristocracy because of her wit and lack of fear during her trial, but. she was exiled to the provinces by the king.

Voet painted her again, a few times, for example as St Catherine of Alexandria, and as Cleopatra, which was, for want of a better word, a slightly saucier version.


Borders & Mounts

None of our prints come with separate mounts. Some have a printed border which replaces the need for a mount, and some are borderless pieces. In either case the edge to edge size of the prints is 'A' sized as stated. If you should want a mount around your print, then you just need to buy a mount for the 'A' size you choose and then a frame to go with that.

What size frame do I need ?

Each piece of artwork in the Musée gallery has been resized to work perfectly with International 'A' paper sizes. All you need to think about when framing your Musée artwork is that it needs to be in the appropriate A sized frame. This means that no part of your artwork will be lost to cropping when choosing frame sizes. It also means that everything will work proportionately in gallery walls, and print sets. There are many budget, off the shelf A sized frames on sites like Etsy and Ebay which we very happily recommend for our prints.

We also now produce our own collection of high quality, professionally framed artwork, ready to hang.

To see our collection of quality frames - CLICK HERE

Print Quality

Our approach to printing is built on the ability to faithfully reproduce artworks using the finest inks and papers available today. A world away from mass produced posters we take pride in producing beautiful, affordable, fine art prints in-house, for discerning interior lovers everywhere.

Giclée Printing - In order to achieve this consistent, outstanding quality we produce every archival pigment print (alternatively know as giclée) to order using the same ink, paper and printing techniques used by museums all over the world. (Giclée is pronounced gee-clay with a soft G) Our archival giclée prints are loved for their vibrant tonal range and the handmade feel of their beautiful textured papers. The quality of a giclée print is far superior to all other forms of printing and when done authentically it is the closest reproduction printing method possible for matching to an original artwork.

Acid Free Paper - Each piece of Musée Art is printed to order on 312 GSM Paper. GSM is a measurement of the thickness of the paper. It is based on calculating the amount a sheet of paper would weigh, in grams, if it was exactly one square metre in size. Paper with a higher GSM will generally be thicker and therefore more difficult to crease or tear. Museum grade acid free papers are made from 100% cotton pulp rather than wood-based products. High quality cotton fibre paper is known to last hundreds of years without appreciable fading, discolouration, or deterioration due to the fact no chemicals are used in its production. Unlike wood based, mass produced alternatives,which will deteriorate, fade and change colour over time.

Inks - Archival pigment printing (giclée) uses inks which have longevity rates calculated at over 100 years. This printing technique must utilise eight or more different ink colours which are colour profiled to match the archival paper to achieve a perfectly colour accurate reproduction of the original piece of art. 

Mount Board - All Musée museum quality prints are professionally mounted on 2.4mm acid free art board ready to free stand or frame. Mounted prints also help to preserve the qualty of the edges and keep the prints perfectly flat with no risk of cockling. Cockling is the process by which a print starts to ripple due to changing levels of ambient moisture which are naturally present in the air in all our homes. Also, when you decide to either change your Musée artwork in your frames or swap them out for a new find, a Musée mounted print will stay flat and safe whilst in storage.

Stacked image of fanned white 312 gms paper showing the high quality and softly woven texture of the surface of the paper.

312 gsm Paper

All muséee prints are reproduced on the finest quality 312 gsm museum archival acid free paper.

Mount Board

All Musée prints are mounted on acid free 2.4 mm mount board ready for
framing or free standing display.

Image of a single sheet of cotton rag paper showing the soft woven texture of the surface.

Cotton Rag

100% natural cotton based paper has a beautiful fine textured finish.