PARIS.- Cécile Solibieda, auctioneer at the Hôtel des ventes Orléans Madeleine, in collaboration with Cabinet Turquin, has rediscovered an important painting by Laurent de La Hyre, considered to be one of the undisputed masters of 17th-century French painting. This large work (2.04 x 2.70 m), lost since the painter's death inventory in 1657, had been hanging in the stairwell of the Château de Villebourgeon in Sologne (Loir-et- Cher) since 1850 without its owners having identified it. The work will be sold at auction with an estimate of €500,000/700,000 at the Hôtel des ventes d'Orléans Madeleine on 15 November 2025, along with around a hundred other paintings and works of art from the same provenance. The rediscovery of this painting is a major event for art historians, who will see it as shedding new light on the artist's body of work. Its sale will provide an opportunity to bring together a number of works of art selected for a prestigious sale.

The interest of art historians

The early career of this promising young artist is attracting growing interest from researchers. The reappearance of this spectacular, previously unpublished large-format painting by the young Laurent de La Hyre, produced around 1624-1628, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and kept in the same collection for 175 years, is therefore an unexpected event that adds to art historians' knowledge of French painting in the first quarter of the 17th century.

An ambitious subject

Our painter is confronted with a mythological episode mentioned by Homère and rewritten by Ovide in his Metamorphoses (Book XII, 146-459): the battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths. During the wedding of Pirithoos, King of Thessaly, to Hippodamia, the sumptuous banquet degenerates into a bloody battle. The Centaurs, barbarian cousins, give themselves up, drunk with wine and savagery, to unbridled brutality against the Lapithaean women. To better embody the opposition between civilisation (the Lapiths) and barbarism (the Centaurs), Laurent de La Hyre has set the scene in an imposing imaginary palace in which we can see the buffet of outrageous luxury. La Hyre shows his mastery of anatomy through the nudes and the entanglement of bodies. As for the background, it is a masterly demonstration of perspective and architecture. The painting bears witness to the virtuosity and impetuosity of a young artist in the process of discovering his talent, investing all his knowledge in an ambitious and experimental composition.

A museum painting

This large museum painting marks a transition between the memories of the Fontainebleau school and the Parisian Baroque of the reign of Louis XIII. Among La Hyre's other youthful paintings with comparable elements is Hercule and Omphale, in the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg, which he painted around the age of twenty. Three paintings in the Louvre can also be compared: La Tuile (1628-1630); La Vierge veillant l'Enfant endormi (c. 1625); Adonis mort, avec son chien (1628-1630). Several of these works are recorded, like ours, in the family inventories of 1638 and 1657.

In this early masterpiece, Laurent de La Hyre, barely twenty years old, demonstrates his ambition and his ability to unify diverse sources. At the same time as demonstrating his mastery of expression, nudes, decorum and architectural perspective, La Hyre describes the torments of the human soul, invents an original choreography and demonstrates a sense of narrative that would continue to assert itself throughout his career.

Château de Villebourgeon, the setting for Nicolas Vanier's 2017 film L'école buissonnière, was home to a number of paintings that had remained unchanged since the mid-19th century. This is the case of this suite of twelve paintings by the Flemish School of the 17th century, representing The Twelve Emperors, a series originally painted by Titian and then copied by Rubens, whose originals have all disappeared. Before their disappearance in 1734, Titian's paintings were widely distributed thanks to engravings and copies, the most famous of which were those made by Peter Paul Rubens, painted copies that have now been lost or dispersed. The representation of the first Roman emperors, from Julius Caesar to Domitian, had a major influence on the art and visual culture of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, in a context where the Roman imperial figure was valued as a model of power. It is rare to find a complete series such as the one conserved at Villebourgeon (estimate €20,000/30,000).

Among the 26 paintings appraised by Turquin & Associés is a canvas by Charles Poerson, a rare artist and Simon Vouet's best collaborator, who was studied in the 1980s (estimate €6,000/8,000).

The story of Alexander taming Bucephalus, according to which the young Alexander, then aged around 12, managed to master a horse that no-one could approach, simply by understanding that it was afraid of its shadow, is a subject that has always fascinated artists, as in this painting by the 17th-century Florentine School from the Tempesta circle (estimate €8,000/12,000).

Sainte Catherine d'Alexandrie, by Jacques Blanchard and his studio, is a painting whose original version was found in the Musée de la Marine de Loire in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire and recently attributed to the artist (estimate €8,000/10,000).