Allegory of Music

1649 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

mythological

This is one of a series of half-length female figures of the seven Liberal Arts which once belonged to Gédéon Tallemant (1613-1668), one of the counselors of King Louis XIII, apparently painted for his house in the Rue d'Angoumois, Paris. The pictures vary in size, and all are dated 1649 or 1650. The Liberal Arts were the literary trio, Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic, and the mathematical quartet of Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astronomy.

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About the Artist

Laurent de La Hyre

1606 – 1656

La Hyre (also spelled La Hire) was a French Baroque classical painter whose best work is marked by gravity, simplicity, and dignity. He was the son of the painter Étienne de La Hyre (c. 1583-1643) but was most influenced by the work of Georges Lallemant and Orazio Gentileschi. His picture of Pope Nicolas V at the Tomb of Saint Francis was done in 1630 for the Capuchins, for whom he executed several other works. For the goldsmiths' company he produced in 1635 St Peter Healing the Sick and the Conversion of St Paul in 1637. In 1648, with 11 other artists, he helped found the French Royal Academy. Cardinal Richelieu called him to the Palais-Royal about 1640 to paint decorative mythological scenes, and he later designed a series of tapestries for the Gobelins.

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