Advert Description
Are you interested in this item? This item is up for auction at Catawiki. Please click on "respond to advert" (orange button) to get redirected to the Catawiki website. Catawiki’s goal is to make special objects universally available. Our weekly auctions feature thousands of unusual, rare, and exceptional objects you won’t find in just any store. Engraving "The Empire of Flora".
Plates made by Gérard AUDRAN (1640-1703)
French school
engraved after Poussin, Nicolas
https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl020524744
Copper plates purchased in 1782 by the Royal Academy.
High quality workmanship, in very good condition.
Engraving from the Chalcography Workshop of the Louvre
The engraving represents the metamorphoses into flowers of several characters from Greco-Roman mythology: Ajax (left), Crocus and Smilax (right), Narcissus (in the middle with the Nymph Echo in front of him), Clythie (in the background turning towards Apollo, her lover, who pulls a winged chariot in the sky), Adonis (in the background on the right, wearing a tunic) a hunter wounded in the thigh, or Hyacinthe (near Adonis).
The characters are those that Poussin had painted four years earlier in Le Triomphe de Flore, now in the Louvre.
Original wooden frame, has very slight lacks (see photo).
Number 1267 inscribed at the bottom right by hand, corresponding to the plate number.
Paper marked with the seal of the Louvre workshop.
Note: very slight sunstroke. Sold as is. 67454939
