A La Hyre for the Städel Museum

9/10/25 - Acquisition - Francfort, Städel Museum - Already home to two major seventeenth-century French paintings — Claude Lorrain’s Noli me tangere and, more importantly, the largest landscape ever painted by Nicolas Poussin — the German museum has recently set its sights on another prominent artist of the period: Laurent de La Hyre. Acquired with the support of the Städelscher Museums-Verein, the museum’s friends association, this painting (ill. 1) is one of the many variations on a theme dear to the artist: The Assumption of the Virgin. It reappeared at auction in Moulins in September 2017, where it was purchased by the Parisian art dealer Éric Coatalem, who restored it, studied it, and subsequently exhibited it.

The most important Assumption by Laurent de La Hyre remains, of course, the 1635 canvas (ill. 2) commissioned for the high altar of the Capuchin convent church on the rue Saint-Honoré, now housed in the Louvre and long considered the artist’s most famous work. This composition — nowadays perhaps too seldom looked at in the museum galleries — undoubtedly contributed to the rise of La Hyre’s Parisian career. He subsequently painted two Mays for Notre-Dame [1] in 1635 and in 1637. La Hyre also produced two other large altarpieces on the same subject, known through historical sources but now lost: one adorned Soissons Cathedral until the First World War, the other was kept at the Quinze-Vingts hospital until the French Revolution — both seemingly swept away by the upheavals of history, despite their large scale.

In a rather blatant pro domo claim,…