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It is one of only two or three remaining paintings from a project commissioned by Charles Perrault, a great literary figure and art theorist as well as an aide to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's chief minister. Although ostensibly an Allegory of Music, elements in the composition itself, as well as literary and external pictorial evidence, allow us to identify it as a Portrait of Mme. de Maintenon with the Natural Children of Louis XIV.
The picture was originally part of a complex ceiling design depicting the Arts and Sciences commissioned by Perrault for his house in the rue Neuve des Bon-Enfants, Paris. There were eleven separate compositions executed by some of the most popular painters in France in the 1680s, mainly pupils of Charles Le Brun, including, among others Charles de la Fosse, Jean-Baptiste Corneille, Louis de Boulogne, Claude Audran II and Antoine Coypel.
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