We grace our cover with a portrait of the lute player Charles Mouton (1626-1710), painted in 1690 by François de Troy (1645-1730) and housed in the Louvre.
These days both the painter and the musician are little known, but they enjoyed great esteem and fame the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Troy boasted an abundant artistic output covering a wide range of themes, from genre work to historical representations, and mythology and religion.
He was director of the French Academy in Rome, the city in which he died.
