PARIS, POSSIBLY BY HIPPOLYTE DE COMANS, WORKSHOP OF FAUBOURG SAINT-MARCEL, MID-17TH CENTURY

Ovid's Metamorphoses experienced a renewed interest with the new translation by Renouard, which was richly illustrated and first printed in 1619. Simon Vouet was not the only designer to take up this theme at the time and it appears that the Royal Gobelins workshops sometimes combined scenes by differing artists to enlarge sets. This particular scene does not belong to the first group of eight subjects, often called Les Amours des Dieux, which are firmly attributed to Vouet. A second, consisting of nine tapestries, formed a separate, less theatrical series that was closely related and that appears to have been drawn by the workshop, followers of and Simon Vouet himself. Michel Dorigny has been identified as the painter of a landscape in one of the tapestries. Cardinal Mazarin's inventory of 1653 records a set of nine tapestries form this series with medallion borders in his possessions. Indeed, the series seems to have met with some success as seven sets can today be traced with six differing borders. M. Fenaille in his Etat général des tapisseries de la Manufacture des Gobelins, Paris, 1923, vol. I, pp. 349 - 353 mentions several surviving Narcissus subjects, including in his own collection (I. Denis, Lisses et Délices, Chefs-d'oeuvre de la Tapisserie de Henri IV à Louis XIV, exhibition catalogue, 1996, pp. 192-197).

Hippolyte de Comans took over the family weaving workshop in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel in Paris in 1650 and ran it until his death in 1670. He frequently collaborated with the de la Planche workshop then run by Raphael and later his son Sébastien-François.