Lot 26: *LAURENT DE LA HYRE (1606-1656)

signed and dated upper left L. de la Hyre. in & ft/ 1653 oil on canvas Laurent de la Hyre was a quintessential Parisian artist of the first half of the seventeenth century. He received sacred commissions from the Capucins and the Minims and, by the mid-1630s, Cardinal Richelieu became his fervent protector. In addition, he received innumerable secular commissions for both easel pictures and decorations. With the foundation of the Académie Royale in 1648, de la Hyre was appointed one of the original twelve professors and he remained an active member until his untimely death in 1656. Landscape with Two Women at a Fountain, dated 1653, is a major addition to the artist's late oeuvre when his health was deteriorating and his attention turned increasingly to landscape. Painted the same year as Landscape with Bathers (Musée du Louvre, Paris; see fig. 1), it reveals the artist gently eliminating traces of the ``literary'' and concentrating instead on the ``natural,'' absorbing the lessons of the Parisian community in Rome (especially Claude) but allying them with direct feelings of nature. According to Pierre Rosenberg and Jacques Thuillier in their great monographic exhibition on the artist (Laurent de la Hyre 1606-1656; L'homme et l'oeuvre, 1988, p. 328), de la Hyre's work at this moment, perhaps, looks to the future of French landscape painting rather than to the past. There is a Viennese export stamp on the reverse of the painting.

Paul Henreid, Vienna, then Los Angeles (Sale: Sotheby's, New York, May 20, 1993, lot 7) there purchased by the present collector for $415,000