The Boy King Louis XIV and the Regency

When Louis-Philippe converted the Palace of Versailles into a museum of French history, this wing of rooms, once home to the court nobility, was transformed into galleries tracing the life of Louis XIV. The first room displays paintings of the young Louis XIV and his family, including a portrait of him as a boy astride a white horse.

Louis XIV's childhood was marked by turmoil. His father, Louis XIII, died young, leaving him to inherit the throne before he was even four years old. Soon after came the Thirty Years' War and the Fronde, a rebellion of the nobility. It would have been nearly impossible for such a young child to steady this unstable kingdom alone, so his mother, Anne of Austria, took on the regency and governed in his place.

On the wall facing the room hangs an allegorical painting of Anne of Austria's regency. An angel crowns the queen mother with a laurel wreath symbolizing glory, while above her the goddess of Fame sounds a trumpet, and beside them a child holds an olive branch representing peace. The royal court of the time favored this kind of allegory, representing abstract ideas through figures and objects rather than depicting events directly. Such paintings linked the queen mother's rule to virtues like peace, justice, and victory, presenting her regency as legitimate and her bearing as heroic. Louis XIV, who grew up surrounded by these allegorical images, would later draw heavily on the same device in crafting his own image as the Sun King.