Portrait of François Michel le Tellier, marquis de Louvois (1641-1691), half-length, in a white shirt with lace collar and cuffs and a brown mantel, with the Order of Saint Maurice and Saint Lazare, holding an architectural plan

One of the most important political figures of the first part of the reign of Louis XIV, Louvois was the son of the influential statesman Michel le Tellier, marquis de Barbezieux, seigneur de Chaville et de Viroflay (1603-1685), Chancellor of France from 1677. With his father, the marquis de Louvois would increase the size of the French army to 400,000 soldiers, in which form it pursued a number of ambitious campaigns as late as 1713. In 1666 he succeeded his father as war minister, later receiving instruction from Louis XIV's celebrated general Turenne in the requirements of organising and providing armies, a task which occupied much of Louvois's subsequent career. In 1673 he was appointed Grand Vicar of the Order of Saint Lazarus, and in 1688 began assembling plans of the fortified strongholds of France (one of which he appears to hold here) in what was to become the Musée des Plans-Reliefs, Paris, housed today in the Hôtel des Invalides, another of his institutions. His correspondence with the prison governor Bénigne d'Auvergne de Saint-Mars suggests that Louvois may have been one of the few people who knew the secret of the historical Man in the Iron Mask, made famous in the novels of Alexandre Dumas.