Philipe de Champaigne was born in Brussels on 26 May 1602, and first trained there with Jacques Fou[c]quier or Foucquières (1590-1659) as a landscape painter. In 1621 he moved with Fouquier to Paris, where he worked alongside Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) on the decoration of the gallery of the Luxembourg Palace. He was appointed painter to Marie de' Medici in 1628, but also enjoyed the patronage of Louix XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. He painted the latter's full-length portrait which is now in the National Gallery in London, as is the triple head-and-shoulders portrait painted to serve the Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini as a model for the cardinal's bust, just as Anthony van Dyck had earlier done with a triple portrait of Charles I. Champaigne's early work was influenced by van Dyck's portraits and Peter Paul Rubens's religious paintings, but from around 1643 his work for the Jansenists at the convent of Port Royal inspired him to break with the Baroque in favour of a more austere classical style. Amongst his later works is the Ex Voto in the Louvre painted in 1662 in thanks for the miraculous recovery from paralysis of his daughter, who was a nun at Port Royal. The artist died in Paris on 12 August 1674.

This large painting shows the apostle Peter crouching down in a landscape beside a rock, his hands folded in prayer and his eyes on the open book before him. The identity of the saint is clear not just from his bald head and short curly beard, which had been his characteristic hairstyle since early medieval art, but also the two keys on the stone in front of him. St Peter is seated in a landsape, of which the darkening sky is visible on the far left behind the foliage. The head is that of an old man with deep lines across the forehead; his rather contrived pose with the left leg pulled up and the right trailing to the left is emphasised by the artist's use of light and shadow. The saint wears a wide blue tunic falling of his shoulders to reveal his white shirt underneath; also wrapped around him is a cloak in now rather dull yellow. The bare right shoulder is dramatically highlighted in a Caravaggesque way. One might compare the work to other large paintings of apostles and evangelists by contemporaries, such as Hendrick ter Brugghen's four Evangelist figures of 1621 now in the museum De Waag in Deventer. Champaigne also painted a semi-clad St Jerome at his desk around 1630, which was subsequently engraved by Jean Morin and Gerard Edelinck (see Dorival, 1992, no. 3).