The Visitation

Watermark: none.
Unlike most artists before him, La Hyre trained in Paris and chose to remain there rather than traveling to Italy. An intellectual with an interest in archaeology and antiquity, he was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and one of the artists whose style defined the classical taste. Here La Hyre depicted an encounter between the elderly Elizabeth, who has conceived the child who will become John the Baptist, and her cousin Mary, who has just received news of her pregnancy from the angel Gabriel and will give birth to the Christ child. This elegant and rigorous composition may have been a preparatory design for a lost altarpiece. -- Exhibition Label, From "Poussin, Claude, and French Drawing in the Classical Age"