Lot 271: LAURENT DE LA HYRE (Paris 1606-1656)

Two winged putti desporting in a landscape oil on canvas 353/4 x 461/2 in. (90.8 x 118.1 cm.) NOTES The present lot is one of the earliest surviving paintings by La Hyre. Like the Hercules and Omphale in the Kurpfalzisches Museum, Heidelberg (see Pierre Rosenberg and Jacques Thuillier in the exhibition catalogue, Laurent de La Hyre, Grenoble-Rennes-Bordeaux, 1989, no. 31), The Tile in a private collection in Paris ( ibid., no. 51), and the recently rediscovered Death of Adonis, which was acquired by the Louvre in 1994 (see St‚phane Loire in Mus‚e du Louvre: Nouvelles Acquisitions du D‚partement des Peintures 1991-1995, Paris, 1999, pp. 124-126), the present lot dates from the mid-1620s. It is painted in a loose Mannerist style that derives from the second School of Fontainbleau and was a legacy of La Hyre's teacher, the painter and draftsman Georges Lallemant. Although no other painting by La Hyre of children frolicking in a landscape is known today, subject appears in several of his earliest signed etchings (see Rosenberg and Thuillier, op. cit., nos. 21-22 and 24-26). The present lot may be the painting of children that appeared in the 1638 inventory made after the death of the collector Philippe Humbelot (no. 12: "Item un tableau ou sont repr‚sent‚s des petits enffans, sur son chassis, prise C sols") and reappeared in the 1657 inventory made after the death of the artist (no. 20: "un tableau... ou est represente des petits enfants", priced at 22 livres ).