Paris and Oenone

This hitherto unpublished work is an excellent example of why Gerard de Lairesse earned the sobriquet 'the Dutch Poussin'. His formative years were spent in Liège where he fell under the influence of Betholet Flémal whose work showed a taste for classical settings and atmospheric lighting. In 1665 Lairesse settled in Amsterdam. He sat for Rembrandt in that year for the portrait now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and he integrated quickly with the city's intellectual elite who held a predilection for French art and civilisation. Lairesse effectively catered to this taste, producing theatrical works that often took Ovidian or Virgilian themes as their subjects and were often overtly Poussinesque in character. There are two other dated pictures from 1668 (Venus appearing to Aeneas, Musée Magnin, Dijon; and Three putti playing with a dove, Colombus Gallery of Fine Art, Ohio; see A. Roy, Gérard de Lairesse, Paris, 1992, pp. 229-231, nos. 46 and 48), both of which share the same stylistic traits as the present work.