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BESCHREIBUNG:
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This large and impressive drawing is a preparatory study for the composition of La Hyre’s monumental altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin, painted in 1635 for the high altar of the Capuchin church on the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris and today in the Louvre. Part of a series of grand altarpieces painted by La Hyre in the 1630’s, The Assumption of the Virgin was originally surmounted by an oval painting, now lost, of Christ in Glory by the same artist. A measure of the importance La Hyre must have given the commission is seen both in the prominent signature and date at the bottom of the canvas, as well as the fact that one of the Apostles depicted, namely the youth who lifts up the cloth over the empty tomb, is a self-portrait. The altarpiece became one of the artist’s best-known works in Paris, made even more so by the publication of two reproductive etchings of the painting, one by Antoine De La Court and the other by La Hyre’s pupil François Chauveau.
This drawing may be compared with other drawings by La Hyre for altarpieces of the mid-1630’s, such as a study of The Adoration of the Shepherds in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, preparatory for a painting of 1635 now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, and a Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple in the British Museum, which is a study for an altarpiece of 1636 now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Both of these drawings, like the present sheet, display several significant differences of detail from the paintings for which they are studies. This is a particular characteristic of La Hyre’s compositional drawings, and suggests that the artist continued to make changes to his paintings with brush in hand, even after the basic elements of the composition had been determined. The present sheet shows a number of significant differences from the final work, particularly in the arrangement of the Virgin and putti in the upper register of the composition.
A compositional drawing by La Hyre in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans would appear to be a first idea for the altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin of 1635. The Orléans drawing shows the Virgin and putti in much the same arrangement as in the final painting, but reverses the main figures of the Apostles in the foreground. The present sheet, which is more finished than the Orléans sketch, and exhibits a more fully developed composition, must have followed it in the preparatory process. It is interesting to note, however, that in this drawing the artist seems to have attempted a different arrangement for the Virgin and putti at the top of the composition, before returning to the grouping first studied in the Orléans sheet.
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