Workshop of Eustache Le Sueur, *Vision of Saint Rose or Saint Dorothea*.

This work has been attributed by the painter’s specialists to the studio of Eustache Le Sueur. Eustache Le Sueur was one of the great French painters of the first half of^{the 17th} century and the favourite pupil of Simon Vouet (1590–1649), the King’s principal painter, whose studio he joined in 1632. Le Sueur did not undertake the journey to Italy and therefore discovered Italian art through the royal collections and Vouet’s teaching.

Nicolas Poussin’s return to France, between 1640 and 1642, marked a turning point in Le Sueur’s career. Influenced by Poussin’s art, he simplified his colour palette and sought sobriety in his figures’ poses within clear compositions. He thus became the leading figure of a new style of painting, which is today known as ‘Parisian Atticism’. Richelieu was, in fact, pursuing a genuine ‘artistic policy’, which found visual expression in this new movement in painting, in keeping with the classical aspirations of the French court.

This style stood in clear contrast to the art of his former master, Simon Vouet, through its constant reference to antiquity and the art of Raphael. The compositions, simply arranged, remain static, eschewing illusionism and movement, except perhaps in the elegant drapery or the dancing gestures of the figures, for the artists of this movement were all master draughtsmen, with a love of fluid forms. With the commission, in 1645, of a series of twenty-two paintings depicting the Life of Saint Bruno for the Chartreuse de Paris (now in the Louvre), his austere style became even more radical. This trend in Parisian painting had a profound influence on the educational principles of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, of which Le Sueur was one of the founding members in 1648.

The work at the Château d’Aulteribe is fully in keeping with the formal experiments undertaken by Le Sueur. The number of figures is reduced, their poses are unambiguous, and the arrangement of the figures is clear, on either side of a diagonal axis. The chromatic restraint is here enlivened by the grey axis of the clouds, intersected by the light brought by the angel, which illuminates the saint. The palette contrasts bold shades of reds, yellows and intense blues in particular, lending the work an energetic character.

Experts have linked the painting to a description from 1653 by Florent le Comte, which refers to a work painted by Le Sueur for the ‘dean of Notre-Dame’, depicting ‘an angel bringing a saint [sic] a basket full of flowers’. The saint mentioned by Le Comte is thought to be Saint Dorothea, who is shown receiving a basket of apples and roses from Paradise from an angel, though the saint has sometimes been identified as Saint Rose. Aulteribe’s work is also associated with a drawing held at the Louvre Museum, dated 1646–1647, depicting a kneeling woman in a similar pose. This pose, seen in the drawing and therefore in Aulteribe’s painting, is also found in a work attributed to the workshop of Eustache le Sueur depicting Saint Catherine, held at the Church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris. The drawing in the Louvre may therefore have served as the basis for these two compositions from the workshop.

Alain Mérot, Eustache Le Sueur (1616–1655), Paris, Arthéna, 1987, p. 43 and no. R. 61.

Marguerite Sapin, ‘Further details on the history of some of Eustache Le Sueur’s paintings’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français, 1984 , Paris, 1986, no. 54.