Bourdon was sent to Paris as an apprentice at the age of seven, enlisted in the army for lack of funds, and was rescued by an officer who financed his trip to Rome in 1634. There he befriended Claude Lorrain and Poussin, before being forced to flee in 1638 to escape the Inquisition because of his Calvinist faith. His life reads as a sequence of escapes.

He was born in Montpellier in 1616, the son of a Protestant glass painter. Back in Paris after the Roman flight, he became a co-founder of the French Royal Academy in 1648, later serving as professor and rector. In 1652, Queen Christina of Sweden appointed him first court painter, though the posting lasted only two years. His versatility was unusual: landscapes, religious compositions, mythological scenes and strikingly lifelike portraits all came from the same hand with equal competence.

His Calvinist background gave him access to Protestant networks across Europe while limiting his access to Catholic commissions in France. He died in Paris in 1671, at fifty-five.

His Calvinist background gave him access to Protestant networks across northern Europe while restricting his ability to secure the most lucrative Catholic commissions in France. The tension between faith and profession forced him into a peripatetic career that, paradoxically, gave his art a cosmopolitan range that more settled painters lacked.