The son of Laurent Vouet, a little-known painter often employed in the service of the Crown, Simon Vouet seems to have been highly precocious and first travelled to England at the age of fourteen, to execute a portrait commission. He then embarked upon a more extensive tour, first going to Constantinople, and from there on to Venice and Rome, where he remained (with brief trips to Genoa and Milan) from 1614 to 1627. During his thirteen years in Rome he became, with Valentin, the leading French exponent of the Caravaggesque style, as exemplified by his Fortune Teller now in Ottawa and the Birth of the Virgin for San Francesco a Ripa, perhaps his first major public commission in Rome.